


As Time Goes By

by Trouble_With_The_Snap



Series: The Monkey's Paw [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 20th Century, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Consequences, Domesticity, F/M, Gen, Government Conspiracy, M/M, Marital Issues, Period Typical Attitudes, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Slow Burn, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:41:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 66,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23844628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trouble_With_The_Snap/pseuds/Trouble_With_The_Snap
Summary: Steve returns the Infinity Stones, and then he returns to Peggy. He believes that he’s prepared to live out the twentieth century with her as an ordinary civilian, even if the inexorable passage of time finds him increasingly haunted by the ghosts of futures past. It’s everything he’s wished for.Nothing comes without a price.
Relationships: Howard Stark/Maria Stark, James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov
Series: The Monkey's Paw [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1718215
Comments: 197
Kudos: 166





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Not my characters, etc.; just playing in the Marvel sandbox. Do not move or copy to another site/forum.
> 
> I hated Endgame for myriad reasons, but most of all because I think it butchered Steve's character at the end. I don't think he would have been so selfish as to abandon everyone he loves and create his very own parallel universe to retire in, evidently content to ignore a great many "situations going south". But apparently, he did. So, here you go – I’ve decided to work out my frustration by giving Steve exactly what he asked for.
> 
> Be careful what you wish for, Steve.

_“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”_

_― Margaret Atwood_

2029 – ( _t_ )1

Even before he sees the battered, smoking ship drop in from the atmosphere, Strange assumes that Barton is dead. The eldritch scream which echoes unnaturally in his head and shatters every window on the eight floor of Stark Tower can really only mean one thing. 

He hears the whine of the engines sputter into silence, but takes a moment to collect himself before heading down to third-floor conference room. Someone must be alive or the ship wouldn’t have made it back, of course, but if they’ve lost too many—if they’ve failed in their mission—there’s nothing else to do but wait for eternity to collapse in on itself. 

He’s on the tenth floor but he takes the stairs anyway. He tells himself that it wouldn’t do to be caught on the elevator in case of another earthquake. When he finally reaches the conference room, he sees a lone figure already seated at the long glass table. 

It’s Barnes, slouched and staring at nothing, seemingly unconcerned that he’s absolutely drenched in blood. Even the tips of his hair are dripping red. It can’t all be his or he wouldn’t be upright, but Strange sees an angry-looking gash running from his temple almost to his lips, which should have already healed on the journey back to Earth. His blank face betrays no pain, though, and as Strange watches, a rivulet of the blood soaking Barnes’s black tac-vest starts to drip onto the plush white rug. 

Barnes doesn’t acknowledge Strange as he enters the room and pulls out a chair, but Strange doesn’t expect him to. Barnes is taciturn even on his good days.

“Barton?” Strange asks abruptly. He and Barnes were friendly, Strange thinks; might as well rip the bandage off.

Barnes nods, worrying one gloved finger at a non-existent smudge on the table. “And Gamora.” 

Strange curses inwardly. That’s the penultimate failsafe and a vital fighter gone. They’re lucky Barnes had survived. “The others?”

Barnes shrugs. “Okay. I don’t think they were up for a debrief today.”

“And the mission?”

Barnes nods, face empty. “Successful.”

Strange breathes a sigh of relief, not caring if Barnes hears. If they succeed, none of this will matter, anyway. 

“Who has it?”

“Carol.”

Barnes looks back down at the table. They sit in silence, punctuated only by the soft drip of blood. Strange tries not to think about just whose blood it is.

“So, we’re down to it. You’re up.” Strange says finally, trying to discern any sort of expression on Barnes’ face. If Barnes fails, he’ll have to—think of something very fast.

The erstwhile Sergeant only nods indifferently, and Strange feels a flash of irritation. If Barnes’ heart isn’t in this—literally—the whole plan will be derailed. 

“And you’re sure it’s going to work?” he prods.

Barnes just shrugs again. The cut on his forehead is still sluggishly bleeding.

“Barnes,” Strange says, finally allowing his frustration to creep into his voice, “I’m going to need to hear some actual assurance from you, here, because if you don’t think that you—” 

“Why do you think I’m here?” Barnes interrupts, finally looking at him. His patient expression is made grisly by the gore marring his white face.

“I just thought you might want to shower, first,” Strange retorts. Wanda might need to pull that cut together, too.

“Let’s just get it over with.”

“You can’t seriously think that you’re going to go _now_.”

Barnes glares at him coldly, and then turns his attention back down to the table. 

Strange sighs audibly. Quiet and reticent as he is, in his own way, Barnes is just as dramatic as everyone else. Still, Strange supposes he has some reason to be.

“I’m sorry,” he offers, and for the first time he sees Barnes’ face crumble, just the smallest bit. Barnes lowers his head immediately, hiding his expression behind his matted hair. 

Strange looks away.

They sit in silence for a moment.

“We’ll all reconvene tomorrow at 0900 and discuss it then,” Strange says finally as he rises. He gestures to Barnes’ forehead. “Do something about that.” 

He strides out of the room without waiting for a response. Realistically, they should spend at least a few days planning this out, but he’s worried about Barnes’ mental state. Strange had been highly dubious when Barton had first raised the idea, but they don’t really have another choice.

He flinches when a distant wail echoes through the Tower. They can’t afford for Wanda—or any of them—to lose it now, when they’re so close. 

“FRIDAY?”

“Yes, sir?”

Stark’s AI sounds quiet, almost submissive these days, as though all of her spirit had died with her creator.

“Keep an eye on Barnes. Let me know if he does anything—out of the ordinary.”

“Of course, sir.”

One chance, that’s all they’ve got. He remembers holding up his finger to Stark, once— _this is the only way_. 

The problem was always the question, not the answer.

Outside the Tower, the sky begins to tear itself apart.

1946 – ( _t_ )5

“I’m sorry I’m late.”

“…Steve?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Period-typical sensibilities, discussions of infertility.

1947 – ( _t_ )5

It’s been easier than Steve had thought to keep his secret. Almost every available image of Captain America has him wearing the famous helmet and cowl, and almost anyone who knew him personally is either off being career military somewhere or dead. 

For those first few weeks, Steve felt dazed, as though he’s literally died and gone to heaven. He floats dreamlike through a world he’d expected to see again only in his memories. He wants to see the Howling Commandos, who apparently reunite once a year to toast to his and Bucky’s memory. He wants to see Winifred Barnes, and little Becca Barnes, who must surely be married by now. He’s devastated to discover that they’re both already dead; Winifred of influenza, and Becca in childbirth. Her baby, an unnamed boy, hadn’t survived. The Barnes line will die with Bucky. 

It’s a stark reminder that the first influenza vaccine has only just been debuted. It will be decades before polio is eradicated.

In the end, painful as it is, they decide it safest to tell only Howard. Howard and Peggy work too closely together for him not to notice that she’s married, and they can’t keep Steve hidden from him forever. Besides, Steve knows that Howard is at least partially responsible for the keeping the Captain America mythos alive—every few years or so, apparently, he’d give an update on the search for Captain America, and public interest would renew. 

Unsurprisingly, Howard is rapturous, and as predicted he readily agrees to keep Steve’s secret. Steve can tell that Howard’s dying to probe him about the future, but he eventually concedes to Steve’s halting explanation of why any such revelations could prove disastrous. He’s also instrumental in procuring Steve a new identity and a shiny new war pension along with it. Steve quickly grows to dread evenings out with the Starks, however—Howard takes to telling war stories laced with broad hints and less-than-subtle allusions, all but winking at Steve, and Steve worries that one night he’ll have a bit too much to drink and spill the beans entirely. Steve wonders, sometimes, whether telling him might have changed too much—will Tony grow up more or less neurotic, this time?—but it can’t be helped. 

Steve and Peggy marry in London. Neither of them cares much for pomp and circumstance, and the ceremony is simple. Peggy is Anglican and Steve a latent Irish Catholic, so they marry in a courthouse. The day dawns bright and beautiful, the sky so blue that Steve almost can’t believe that he’s in England. Peggy wears a modest ivory dress and a veil, and Steve aches just looking at her. The only thing marring the day is his constant worry that it’s all too perfect to be real.

“You made it, after all,” she whispers to him, just before their vows, and for the first time in his life, Steve’s heart feels completely full. When he takes her gently in the marriage bed, he cries. They both do. It’s not his first time having sex (although he suspects, from her uncharacteristic nervousness, that it might be hers), but it’s the first time he’s ever _made love_ —finding the right partner turns out to be as achingly sweet a thing as he’d always hoped.

1948 – ( _t_ )5

“Well, Steve McCauley,” she says sweetly to him, as they leave the dance floor to couples without two left feet, “You’ve got all the time in the world, now that you’ve officially been discharged. What would you like to do with it?”

Her eyes twinkle. ‘Steven McCauley’, the son of Irish immigrants and a Manhattan native, is receiving a generous pension from the United States Army, courtesy of Howard Stark, and will be able to go to college on the G.I. Bill. Steve had never thought he’d actually even make it to college, let alone study whatever he wanted without worrying about where his next meal was coming from. Peggy’s been lightly teasing him about college ever since it came through, both of them infectiously excited about the possibilities that lie ahead. 

“I don’t know,” he tells her, still giddy at the prospect. He throws back his head and laughs. “You know, at first I thought pneumonia was going to finally lick me one day, and then I thought I was doomed to be Captain America forever.”

“And then you went to the future,” she finishes, shaking her head mock-sadly. “Really, Steve, a brilliant mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

He grins at her, and takes another sip of his beer. He can’t get drunk, but he thinks he’ll never stop marveling at how _full_ beer tastes here—he supposes he’d eventually gotten used to the weak piss the twenty-first century tries to pass off as a decent brew. Every time he takes a taste, he feels like he’s stepping out of Plato’s cave. 

“Well,” he says thoughtfully, thumbing the rim of his glass, “I’ve always wanted to actually study art. I took a class once, but it wasn’t like I could afford anything fancy.”

Peggy sits back, surprised. “I’d no idea!”

“Yeah,” Steve says, smile fading a bit. He’d tried to take up sketching again when he first woke up in the future, but his fingers could only conjure painful memories. Technically, he hasn’t put pencil to paper in well over a decade. 

He shakes the thought away. “I used to sketch Bucky over and over, since I didn’t have anyone else to practice on.” 

Bucky had made for a terrible model, refusing to sit still for longer than it took to smoke half a cigarette. His face, when he begrudgingly allowed Steve to capture it, was difficult to master, that tiny hint of vulnerability easily lost in shadows and curious angles, but eventually Steve came to know Bucky’s full lips and sharp cheekbones better than his own face in the mirror. 

Peggy smiles sympathetically. “Well, I don’t know that I can measure up to such a handsome face, but I’ll do my best.”

Steve kisses her, impulsively. He knows that Peggy hadn’t liked Bucky very much; after their first disastrous meeting, Bucky had generally just avoided her, denying himself a second chance at a good impression. Not that Bucky had had much occasion to rub elbows with the top brass, anyway. Still, on the infrequent occasion that the subject arises, Peggy speaks of Bucky as though he were a dear friend. Peggy’s unfailing kindness is just another reason that Steve loves her.

“But anyway,” Steve says decisively, steering the conversation back to the present. “Can’t pay the bills with sketches. You know what I think I’d like to do?”

She waits, eyes sparkling.

He thinks of waking up in a world in which millions of buildings seemed to have sprung up overnight all around him. Thinks of wandering around Brooklyn in 2012, wondering when his old tenement went down and who’d decided what would go up in its place.

“I think I’d like to become an architect.”

1950 – ( _t_ )5

He’s lived through two alien invasions, but Steve thinks that the most terrifying and exciting moment of his life comes the day that Peggy deliberately places her diaphragm in her bedside drawer, telling him smoothly, “Well, I don’t think we need that tonight, do we?”

Steve is shocked, at first. He’s working part-time as a laborer while he studies at NYU, and Peggy is still struggling to break out of the role she’s been boxed into at the SSR, with no idea that she’ll soon become the founder and Director of SHIELD. It’s hardly the time to sideline herself, but Steve gradually realizes that Peggy only knows that she’s nearly thirty, which must be considered fairly old to be just starting a family in the nineteen-fifties. More than that, he’s seen her secretly dimple when they pass women with bassinets in Central Park, and flush prettily when her girl friends tease her about the third bedroom that Steve currently uses as a makeshift study and art studio.

Still, he doesn’t want her doing anything out of a misguided sense of obligation, and he asks her at least three times if she’s sure before he’s even got his shirt off. The smile on her face leaves no room for doubt.

The next few months pass in a blur of excitement, every morning bringing the possibility of something Steve had never before hoped for in his wildest dreams. When it becomes clear after five months that despite a lack of trying, Peggy shows no signs of being pregnant, she makes an appointment with the doctor.

Steve had always thought that Peggy hadn’t had any children out of choice—that she’d been too busy climbing the ranks of the SSR and founding SHIELD and shattering glass ceilings, or that she simply hadn’t wanted to box herself into the housewife’s role. 

Peggy takes a deep breath, and Steve watches her visibly steel herself. “Well, I suppose its for the best, my darling,” she says, and he sadly falls in love with her all over again when she lifts her head bravely. “I’m not quite sure how we could explain away toddlers with super strength.”

“I don’t think anyone would buy that they’re from Krypton,” Steve agrees, trying to match her joking tone, but she breaks into tears and collapses into his arms.

He holds her all night, and they don’t make love again for almost a month. He waits until she initiates, and it’s bittersweet. 

When he thinks she’s ready to hear it, Steve brings up adoption, but she cuts him off sharply. 

“No, Steve,” she says, with a vehemence that surprises him. Deep in the back of his mind, he can’t help but wonder whether he’s witnessing some latent prejudice of the day that he’d forgotten about. 

“But Peggy, we—I don’t care how they start out, they’ll still be ours. No children will be more loved.”

She tries to smile. “I know that, Steve,” she answers. “But—you know, maybe this is a sign. We’re really starting to get somewhere with SHIELD, and I think that a baby might—well.” 

She finishes applying her lipstick, and adjusts her hair in the mirror.

“Besides,” she says, carefully not looking at him, “It’s probably not safe. You know, the adoption agency would have to check up on us, run background tests. We wouldn’t want your secret getting out.”

She gives him her customary kiss before heading out the door, but her eyes are distant. It’s a wound that even love can’t quite bridge entirely. 

Neither of them bring it up again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, a lot of this--particularly the beginning--is my attempt at a realistic look at what it would be like for Steve to return to the past, and to social mores which must on some level seem outdated to him now. I think it would be relatively easy if Peggy were someone who wouldn’t reasonably be professionally affected by, say, the Iran hostage crisis. But she is a founding member of a what's implied to be a kind of CIA/Special Forces hybrid, and it’s implied that she’s heavily involved in international politics for most of the twentieth-century. Steve would have to decide whether to pony up everything he knows about twentieth-century history, or keep his mouth shut entirely.
> 
> Does Peggy have kids in the movie? Always thought it was odd that her (ridiculously young!) niece would be giving her eulogy, if so.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: period-typical homophobia, insensitive discussions of PTSD, and a lack of anything resembling feminism. Welcome to the Fifties.

1952 – ( _t_ )5

Steve bites his lip when he’s concentrating hard. Peggy hadn’t remembered this little quirk of his, but she finds it utterly endearing. She’s gotten into the habit of sneaking up to his art studio and watching him as he paints, unaware of her observation. She studies the way he squints at the canvas and worries at his bottom lip, his unnaturally steady hand darting in to make quick little brush strokes.

When he’d first returned, she’d delighted at getting to know all of the little pedestrian details that make up _Steve_ that she’d been too busy to notice. She’d gotten to know Captain America well enough during the War, but he was made up of broad brush strokes and primary colors. _Steve Rogers_ is infinitely more complicated. 

Most of the time, it’s like living in a dream. Steve is handsome and upright, a fairy-tale prince come to life, and their dynamic is wholly different than most other married couples she knows. Howard, for example, cheerfully admits to being both ignorant and unconcerned about what Maria does all day—the entire process of running the household is a complete mystery to him, and he invariably refers to any domestic tasks as “women’s things”. Steve, though, doesn’t seem to think twice about splitting household duties and tackling decidedly feminine chores—he even seems like doing laundry, oddly enough, once he figures out the washing machine. She gathers that the process must be different in the future.

She tries not to bring up the future, although of course she’s undyingly curious about it. When he’d first returned, he’d cautioned her over and over about not being able to tell her anything, lest he inadvertently alter the course of time. 

‘I don’t want to change things,’ he’d said. ‘I don’t want to fight anymore. Peggy, I’ve done my fighting. I know that it’ll all turn out alright, as long as I don’t interfere, and I just want to live this life with you.’

He’d ducked his head then, and she’d been amazed that after everything he’s been through he’s still unable to look at her without blushing. 

‘If you’ll have me.’

It isn’t even a question, of course—she’d fallen in love with him the day they’d sat together in that taxicab, even if she hadn’t quite realized it yet. Steve so proud and unwavering even as he looked like a strong breeze might send him flying end over end, and he’d told her that he was waiting for the right partner. 

Privately, she wonders whether he might be irrevocably changing things just by being here with her, and she doesn’t fully grasp Steve’s somewhat confused explanation of time travel and its potential consequences—science fiction is Howard’s purview, and she suspects that Steve’s own rationalization is at least half guess-work. 

They’d discussed it all once, and only once. She can admit to herself that she may never truly understand, but makes the decision to trust him when he tells her that even though terrible things will happen, it will ultimately be for the best that they do. 

She has to.

Still, it’s a bit of a balm when he assures her that he’d only ever gotten a rough sketch of twentieth-century history, being too busy to do otherwise. Privately, she’s relieved not only because she doesn’t want to end up resenting him his silence, but also because she’d like to actually experience life alongside of him.

Most days she forgets he’s even been to the future. He rarely talks about it, and when he does he makes it sound as though it were a fever dream to him that he’d constantly hoped to awaken from. “I never really fit in there,” he tells her once, in a rare moment of openness about it. “You know, I just kept waiting to wake up in 1945. It feels like—like I just took a long trip somewhere that I didn’t much like, and now I’m back.”

He kisses her hair, whispering, “Back home.” 

Still, there are small moments that give her pause. He’s still the same unfailingly polite Steve Rogers, but sometimes he says things that bring her up short. He’s not nervous around women anymore, which isn’t a bad thing, but he’s also not nearly as deferential as Peggy remembers him being. There’s the odd jargon that slips out of him every now and again; he uses the word ‘cool’, for instance, in a nonsensical way that has nothing at all to do with temperature. His demeanor, too, is different in subtle ways—he’s not the bashful boy who’d asked if she “fondue-ed”. He’s harder, and he’s clearly long-since grown used to the power his body wields. In some sense, it’s a relief; she’d always felt a bit like he was taking advantage of his naivety.

Rarely, he’ll tease her with stories of fantastical devices that they’ll be able to use one day, and she can never quite tell if he’s joking or not. Tiny telephones that fit into the pocket of a coat and play music; computers that can send letters across the world in seconds. She’s even less interested in electronics than she is in science fiction, and she tells him to spin his stories to Howard instead. He gets a serious look on his face, then, and tells her that he can’t give Howard any ideas, lest Howard invent something far too early. 

He’s become unbearably picky about food (something an orphan living in a ramshackle tenement could never afford to be) but this turns out to be a blessing. Apparently, Steve had used his time in the future to become a rather decent cook. When they take a trip to Los Angeles and Steve discovers a bodega selling avocados (some kind of oblong fruit) he practically falls over himself in excitement, and insists on buying as much as he can carry. Later that night he toasts a bit of bread and then mashes the fruit onto the toast, like an unappealing jam. It looks dreadful, but she can’t deny that it tastes heavenly. 

And then there are times when something clearly reminds Steve of the future, and wipes his nearly ever-present smile from his face. There doesn’t really seem to be a pattern to it. She gathers that the future was all-around dreadful for Steve, as he rarely seems to remember things fondly, and sometimes she worries that the future is a terrible place, or that another war is coming.

Steve tries to reassure her without really divulging anything at all, and he tells her that for the most part, the Future is safe and secure. 

“I just don’t like thinking about it,” he tells her one night, his fist clenched around a glass that will do nothing to dull his thoughts. He shakes his head. 

She strokes his hair. “Oh, my darling,” she says, pressing a kiss to his temple. “I wish I could just make you forget it all.”

He goes rigid under her hands. A tiny, selfish part of her wishes that she could siphon away the secrets trapped in his golden head; make him forget the Future and whatever he’d found there, because she knows that he’ll never truly be hers, not entirely; at least, not until they’re old enough that whatever he can tell her won’t matter anymore. 

But then he looks at her, with those clear blue eyes, and he kisses her, and she can almost make herself believe that all of Steve Rogers is here with her, right now.

1953 – ( _t_ )5

The Pratt Institute School of Architecture is only about four miles from Red Hook, Brooklyn, but during his first week of classes, Steve had made a conscious decision not to visit his old neighborhood. He’d known since he’d first arrived in 1947 that in order to be present and actually live out a life here, he’d have to forget about his past--all of it--at least to some extent. He owes it to Peggy to keep that promise to himself.

It’s proven a bit harder than he’d thought, especially now that he’s in Brooklyn so often. Luckily, he’s been so tired from his classes and his internship that he’s hard pressed to think about anything much besides architecture. Peggy, too, is incredibly busy of late, with NATO’s recent push for German reunification having kicked the Cold War into high gear. With finals almost here and his projects coming due, Steve and Peggy have become ships passing in the night. He feels a bit silly, sometimes, stressing out about something that feels so pedestrian while his wife is attempting to broker an international ceasefire, but he wouldn’t trade it for anything.

The lack of women on campus is jarring, but he finds he gets along very well with his fellow classmates, most of whom are also vets. Growing up, he hadn’t liked school very much—he’d been mostly unpopular, dressed mainly in charitable hand-me-downs and hopeless at athletics. He’d struggled in classes, too, always falling behind due to illness or lack of sleep from constant hunger. He’d passed high-school by the skin of his teeth.

Now, however, he comes to class with a full stomach and a clear head, and he finds himself very near the top of the class. He’s still amazed that this is his life—his job is to _learn_ , to _create_ , hell, even to _draw_ , at times. For once, his daily battles don’t include widespread destruction and civilian casualties.

He’s giving himself a bit of a break after class, tonight, and going out for drinks with a few of his classmates. Charlie Bennett and Dick Harris are both in his drafting class, friends since before the war. Dick, an even-keeled, easy-going sort of man, had served in the 108th, but Charlie had joined up with the Marines. Despite the permanent limp he must have picked up overseas, he’s almost unfailingly friendly, with the soft brown eyes and happy-go-lucky demeanor of a puppy. 

Steve gathers up his notes as his classmates start to file out after the lecture. From behind him, he hears someone call his name softly.

He turns to find Oliver Parker looking nervously at him. Ollie can’t be more than five feet tall, and he’s remarkably skinny even by the standards of the fifties. From the cut of his clothes, Ollie clearly comes from some means, but he doesn’t mix much with the rest of the class, only speaking when called upon and then barely above a whisper. 

“Sorry,” Ollie starts, turning red as Steve looks at him, “Only I—I came in late, today. If you wouldn’t mind, d’you think maybe I could—”

He gestures at the papers tucked under Steve’s arm.

“Of course!” Steve says automatically. “Or—I’m sorry, I’m about to get drinks with some of the guys. You gonna be in the library tomorrow?”

These past few weeks, half his class has been living at the library. Steve himself has slept there twice to save himself a trip over the bridge. 

“Yeah,” Ollie says, sounding relieved. “Probably most of the day. Shouldn’t need more than a few pages, really.”

“Noon work for you?” Steve asks, smiling, and Ollie tentatively smiles back at him. Ollie is so frail and birdlike that Steve is forcibly reminded of his younger self. He wonders if Ollie has a Bucky to look out for him.

Steve’s just about to ask Ollie if he’d like to join them at the bar when a third voice interrupts. 

“Mac.” 

Charlie is leaning against the wall watching them, an uncharacteristic frown on his face. His eyes are hard as they shift from Steve to Ollie. “You comin’, or what?”

“Noon,” Ollie confirms quietly to Steve, looking anxious again. “Thanks.”

He scurries off past Charlie, giving him a wide berth. Charlie watches him go with a look of undisguised contempt on his face.

“What was that?” Steve asks as he joins him. Ollie isn’t exactly a popular guy, but Steve’s never seen Charlie treat someone with such derision before.

“What?”

“You don’t like him, or something?”

Charlie laughs contemptuously. “C’mon, Mac. Even you can’t be that dense.”

Steve feels impatient. “Let’s say I am.”

“He’s an invert,” Charlie clarifies, curling his lips in a sneer. 

Steve is momentarily stunned. Somehow, he’d managed to forget that that term— _invert_ —exists. He stares at Charlie, whose handsome face is twisted in loathing. He half expects Charlie to peel off that face, revealing a blistered red skull. 

He opens his mouth to tell Charlie off, and for the first time in his life, he hesitates. It’s 1953, and it’s still illegal in New York to love another man. That shouldn’t matter—it _doesn’t_ matter—but—

_I don’t like bullies. I don’t care where they’re from._

“What’s goin’ on?” Dick interrupts, clapping a casual hand on Steve’s shoulder. He looks back and forth between them. “You fellas ready?

“Just about,” Charlie says coolly. “Certain _elements_ were holding us up.” He looks at Steve pointedly.

Steve clenches his jaw, anger rising in his throat, but Dick’s hand tightens on his shoulder. 

“You still on about that?” Dick’s voice is carefully light, but Steve can see the tension in his body. “Charlie, cut the gas. Parker’s no queer.”

“Well, he ain’t no GI,” Charlie retorts, his face reddening in anger. He looks at Steve. “Did you know that, Mac? That fucking guy is a—a _draft dodger_.”

“No, he’s not,” Dick says patiently, approaching Charlie with his hands held up in placation. “C’mon, now knock it off, you’re embarrassing me in front of our colleague, here.”

“Well, he didn’t join up, I can tell you that!” Charlie’s voice sounds almost shrill. 

“Kid’s ninety pounds soaking wet, Charlie, you think they would’ve let him into the army?”

“Audie Murphy—”

Dick barks a laugh gives Charlie a light shove to the shoulder. “‘ _Audie Murphy_ ’, lord, you’re full of it today. Beat feet while we figure out if we’re still planning on joining your sorry ass later.”

Charlie’s fists are still clenched so hard he’s shaking, but when he starts to open his mouth again Dick gives him another, harder shove. “ _Charlie_. Take a walk.”

Charlie stumbles back and scowls. After a tense moment of looking between the two of them, breathing heavily, he wheels around and stalks down the hallway.

Dick watches him go, his face dropping. When Charlie is out of earshot, he turns to Steve. “You gotta understand,” he says quietly, his face tired. “He ain’t usually like this.”

“What, a bully?” Steve asks harshly. 

Dick shakes his head. “Our first year here, he somehow found out that Parker never served—4F, I’m guessing, guy looks like he wouldn’t last two rounds with a stiff breeze—but Charlie got kinda fixated on it. Keeps saying he must be a queer, or that his family bought his way out. Pushed him around a bit.”

Steve fights to control his temper. He can’t figure out who he’s more disgusted by—Charlie, for his hateful bigotry, or himself, for momentarily freezing in the face of it. “So what, anyone the army wouldn’t take is a coward now?”

_What am I gonna do, collect scrap metal in my little red wagon?_

Dick shakes his head, staring after Charlie. “No. I think—he’s jealous, maybe. Charlie’s life woulda been a hell of a lot different if he’d never gone to war. You know, he got discharged after Guadalcanal—leg, of course, picked up a purple heart for it—and his unit got tore up real bad later. He always felt real guilty, goin’ home like that.”

He hesitates. “Sometimes I think it knocked something loose in his head.”

Against his will, Steve’s anger eases the slightest amount, even though Charlie doesn’t deserve it. “Combat fatigue?” _PTSD_ , he almost says, but he’s not sure when the term will even be invented. 

Dick shrugs tiredly. “He never used to go off like that. Temper out of nowhere. Lord, you wouldn’t believe the fights I’ve pulled him out of.”

“So then he should be getting help, not taking it out on other people.”

Dick gives him an odd look. “Help? What, like a head-shrink? Nah, it would tank his career before he even starts if that ever gets out.” He gives Steve a warning look. “Don’t make me sorry I told you, Mac.” 

Steve sighs. “I won’t. Just—keep him away from Ollie, then, would you? He probably feels—well, I couldn’t imagine not being able to do my part.”

Dick looks at him for a long moment. “Yeah, alright,” he says finally, shaking his head and smiling wryly. “Steven McCauley, defender of the downtrodden. Look, I’m sorry, but this probably ain’t the night. Charlie’ll be in a bad spell for awhile and he won’t exactly be great company.”

“You’ll go after him?”

“I’ll make sure he’s alright, yeah.” 

Steve wants to clarify that he isn’t worried about Charlie so much as the poor soul unlucky enough to run into him, but he just shakes Dick’s hand and watches him hurry after his friend.

Suddenly unbearably tired, he decides that he’s going to go home and take the night off. It’s a good idea, except that the long commute leaves too much time to run over the scenario in his mind.

Poor Ollie. No wonder he’d kept his head down in class. For a sick moment, Steve wonders if that’s how he would have ended up, if he’d never met Erskine—branded a coward by his peers. 

Or worse.

On the train, for just a moment, lets himself feel trapped. The future hadn’t exactly been a utopia, but it feels like just yesterday he’d been sitting at the VA, listening to a veteran in group therapy relating his husband's struggles to cope with his flashbacks and mood swings. Steve is suddenly very aware that he’s living in a world in that same man would be arrested. He might even be sent to an asylum, either for loving another man, or for his "un-treatable" shell-shock.

Why had he hesitated to defend Ollie? It’s not as though being in the past is getting to him—hell, he’d spoken up louder back in 1935, so why his reticence now? Captain America, paralyzed in the face of injustice by peer pressure. 

He rests his head in his hands.

If he’s honest with himself, he can admit that maybe he _was_ worried about his own reputation—and by extension, Peggy’s. What would happen if rumors spread that Peggy McCauley’s husband supported gay rights? What could that do to a fledgling SHIELD? McCarthyism is in full swing, and every deviation from the established norm is a red flag in more ways than one; in 1953, how small is the contrived line between “civil rights” and “subversive activities”? 

Maybe it had been easier to stand for things when he hadn’t anything much to lose.

He suddenly realizes that he’s got no idea how Peggy feels about homosexuality. She’s always been his True North, his unerring compass for all that’s right—he can’t imagine she’d begrudge anyone the right to love. He knows for certain that SHIELD had been on the right side of history when it came to civil rights, but—it’s only 1953. He doesn’t know that he can hear something that might be well-intended but ultimately demeaning from her mouth. 

When Peggy returns, he doesn’t bring it up.

1954 –( _t_ )5

Steve doesn’t seem much interested in anything to do with the war, and Peggy supposes she understands. It must be so difficult for him in so many ways, and not least because he’s been to the future.

It’s a bit of a tragedy, really, that Steve—who’d wanted nothing more than to be a common soldier, and do his part—ended up as Captain America, because once again, he’d found himself set apart from the rest of the soldiery. She understands that he’s uncomfortable thinking of himself as just another member of the armed forces, given his particularly specialized role in the fight. Despite the fact that he’d single-handedly saved millions of American lives by sacrificing his own, Steve perpetually insists that he was nowhere near as brave as those soldiers who fought and died without the benefit of personally-tailored equipment and actual superpowers. 

Still, he does agree to come with her to the dedication of the Marine Corps War Memorial, which is held in Arlington Cemetery. It’s an appropriately solemn event, and although she’s mostly immune to American pomp and circumstance she finds the statue genuinely affecting and a bit unnerving. She almost feels sorry for the figures that appear so lifelike, ragged and perpetually pressing onward into an unending war. Apparently, the statue is based upon a photograph taken after a horrific battle on a Japanese island. Peggy’s own role had been confined to the European theater, of course, but she’d read up on the statue’s history a bit in preparation for the dedication. For the first time, she thinks Steve might have had a point. Chasing HYDRA seems to have been infinitely preferable to fighting on Iwo Jima. 

Steve seems similarly discomfited, uncharacteristically worrying at the seam of his trousers during the speeches. Afterwards, she asks him if he’d like to visit any of the graves, but he just shrugs. She supposes that there are really only two who would mean anything in particular to Steve—Colonel Phillips, who died of heart failure in 1949, and Barnes. 

Steve doesn’t talk about Barnes beyond the odd mention here and there, and Peggy thinks she understands why. She’d been surprised and disillusioned when she first met the man that Steve had gone through such trouble to rescue—she’d supposed that Steve’s lifelong friend would have been, well, more like Steve. Beyond his striking good looks, however, Sergeant Barnes had seemed disappointingly ordinary and even a bit loutish, making a halfhearted pass at her before climbing back into his bottle.

At the time, she’d consoled herself with the fact that Steve really hadn’t had the opportunity to make many friends, as no-one had ever given him a chance before. Barnes had probably enjoyed Steve’s company for the favorable comparison it afforded him and they likely wouldn’t have remained friends after the war; she thinks that maybe Steve’s since come to the same conclusion. After all, he’s undoubtedly made better friends since then. 

Even so, he’d taken Barnes’ death awfully hard at the time, and she’s a bit surprised that he’s not taking the opportunity to pay his respects now. Still, he’s had ten years to grieve, and undoubtedly visited Arlington more than once in the ten years he spent in the future. 

So she doesn’t press the matter. That’s the first night that Steve wakes her, thrashing and crying out in his sleep. 

When she manages to shake him awake, he stares straight through her for a moment, his eyes wild. She pets his hair and whispers soothing nonsense, and after a while he focuses on her. 

“Is this real?” he whispers, and her heart breaks.

“Yes, my darling, it’s real.” She presses her head against his, stroking his soft locks. They’re so much darker than she remembers. “I’m here.”

In the morning, neither of them brings it up. Steve seems himself again—better than he had before he’d agreed to come with her to the dedication.

A few days later, she finds his sketchbook lying on the couch where he’d left it, still open to the page he’d been working on. Idly, she picks it up to study it.

He hadn’t gotten very far—the picture is of Steve himself, dressed in what looks like his old Captain American uniform, through a glass darkly. Steve is holding out his arm in an almost Shakespearean pose, as though examining the length of it, except that he’s drawn his hand as though it’s flaking away into the breeze. She sees the same effect at the edges of his heels. 

She puts the sketchbook down, disturbed. It’s not the first time he’s satirized himself—his one-time sketch of Captain America, the dancing monkey, has even been preserved in official records—but the clear metaphor isn’t there, this time. She wonders if he feels that he’s losing himself. 

She promises herself that she’ll scale back work and devote more time to just the two of them, but it’s not long before they get word of the imminent Warsaw Pact and she’s off and running again. The nightmares seem to have stopped entirely, though, and in the end, she chalks the picture up to some artist’s quirk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise I'll get back to the plot eventually! 
> 
> If you didn't know, Audie Murphy was one of the most decorated soldiers of WWII. He was also sickly, underweight, and short -- so, basically Captain America without the super powers. He played himself in his own biopic, which I find endlessly amusing.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Period-typical sexism, racism, and attitudes. At this point, let's just assume that if it happened or was entertained in the twentieth century, it's fair game.

1956 – ( _t_ )5

Steve has only ever viewed the 1950s through the lens of the twenty-first century. Intellectually, he knows that under a thin veneer of prosperity enjoyed by only a fraction of the country, it had been a time of conservative mores and the enforcement of roles. He's also seen a handful of Mad Men episodes, so altogether, he feels that he's braced for the worst. 

Experiencing it, however, turns out to be another thing entirely, and though he feels guilty when he remembers that oppression and subjugation are lurking just out of sight, he's eventually swept helplessly along on the decade’s halcyon tide. Everything seems soft and dreamlike; it feels like the radio plays only love-songs, and the theaters show only light-hearted beach romps. 

Steve had actually done more interacting with women in the twenty-first century than he ever had before the War. One thing he’d had to unlearn and now has to learn all over again is the formal deference routinely afforded to women in this decade. Once, Steve probably would have just thought of it as manners, but now certain niceties observed strike him as patronizing. 

In the future, he’d had to break himself of the habit of standing whenever a female companion stood, and of gentling both vocabulary and subject matter in their presence. What he’d thought respectful had been considered both antiquated and condescending, especially by the hard-bitten fighters and capable professionals that he’d associated with. Now, most of the women he sees are secretaries, and the wives of his friends and coworkers. For the most part, these women are homemakers and mothers and, collectively, their demeanor is as deliberately temperate and domestic as their vocation. 

Every day, Steve marvels anew at Peggy, who dares to break this mold. Her official cover story is that she works for Howard Stark in some vague secretarial capacity, but even that is considered audacious by the standards of the time, since Steve makes more than enough for both of them to live comfortably on. It’s one thing to read about her struggles in the early days of SHIELD, and quite another to watch her gather her strength every day and head into the fight, brilliant and indomitable and impeccably attired. 

He thinks that he’d be used to that by now, too; how _put together_ everyone looks, so different from the careless athleisure or downright sloppiness of the future. When he’d first arrived in the future he’d been stunned and dismayed to realize just how many people actually walked around in their _pajama bottoms_ , unwashed and generally unkempt. 

Now he wonders at impeccably curled hair and neat waists in colorful A-line dresses, carefully immaculate even when running simple errands. More than that, every woman here—even Peggy—looks so tiny and _soft_ to him, which brings mixed feelings. He’d forgotten that women aren’t supposed to work out, here; it will be almost twenty years before women are even _allowed_ to run more than a mile and a half in competition, lest their uteri fall right out of their fragile bodies. 

Consequently, in contrast to the sullen, hard-bodied models and movie stars of the twenty-first century, who’d appeared to Steve a terrifying amalgamation of sharp angles and artfully-applied black eyes glowering down at him, these women of the fifties seem composed of pastel softness and gentle curves. Even sex symbol Marilyn Monroe seems charmingly innocent to him, with her high, squeaky voice and utter lack of muscle tone. 

Of course, it's hard to ignore the ridiculously sexist advertisements he sees everywhere, all featuring beautiful, simple-minded women in gowns and red lipstick, apparently helpless in the face of tight bottle caps and basic logic. Initially appalled, he'd started to find them so hilariously over the top that he'd taken to showing them to Peggy--"Are you woman enough to buy a man's mustard?"--but he'd quickly realized that she doesn't find them to be quite so amusing. 

Tonight, he watches Peggy as she sits at her vanity, carefully applying red lipstick like war paint. They’re meeting Thomas and Evelyn Deering, Steve’s coworker at HLM and his wife, for dinner. Even after almost a decade of retirement, as Steve likes to think of it, he still thrills at such a pedestrian outing—he’d been absurdly pleased when Thomas had first suggested it. Before the War, he could never have dreamed of the life he leads now—in the Future, he could never have brought himself to imagine it, for entirely different reasons. 

They’re quiet on the drive to the restaurant, but the silence is comfortable. He glances over at her, once, and finds her gazing fondly back at him. The cabbie wishes them a pleasant evening in the thickest New York accent Steve’s ever heard, and Peggy rests her hand snugly in the crook of Steve’s arm as he shuts her car door.

It’s not often that Peggy’s able to accompany Steve to these sorts of things—lately she’s been burning the candle at both ends, and when she’s home she prefers to spend time with just the two of them. By necessity, she’s spent the past decade amongst spies, scientists, and soldiers. Steve knows that she prefers to leave the glad-handing to Howard when she can, so he’s doubly grateful that she’d readily agreed to accompany him out tonight. 

Thomas and Evelyn are already seated when they arrive. Thomas stands to shake Steve’s hand and then kisses Peggy on the cheek. Evie smiles up at Steve through her long lashes. Steve has met her briefly once before, at a company event. She used to model in Italy, she claims, and Steve believes her because she’s unusually striking and almost as tall as he is. She favors red, the better to set off blonde curls and catlike green eyes. Her sweetheart neckline edges the line of decorum.

After a mostly-agreeable half-hour filled with the usual expository pleasantries, Steve is starting to regret this particular double date. Thomas is something of an unknown, having just started at HLM, but he’d seemed unfazed when Steve had mentioned that Peggy works full-time. Optimistically, he’d assumed him to be somewhat progressive, at least for the fifties. Tonight, Tom has swiftly proven him wrong, interjecting several patronizing addenda to Peggy’s remarks and on at least one occasion simply steamrollering over her. 

For her part, Evie expertly steers them away from matters of work and geopolitics to lighter topics—scandalous gossip and movie stars, all the things that Peggy generally finds frivolous, although she gamely adds in her two cents where she can. Intentional or not, Evie seems to take every opportunity to interrupt Peggy, her unrelenting vivacity drowning out Peggy’s measured tones. 

By the time the entrée arrives, Peggy is clearly flustered and swiftly becoming annoyed by this uncompromisingly domestic mission. Steve is mortified. 

“So, Peggy,” Evelyn begins, smiling prettily. “What do you think of Elvis Presley?”

“The singer?”

Evie laughs merrily. “Don’t tell me you’ve been working too hard to notice _Elvis!_ ”

Peggy smiles politely. “Well, I know of him, but I’m afraid I’m not too familiar with his music.”

“I think it’s vulgar, myself,” Tom interjects. “Did you see him on the Milton Berle Show?” He shakes his head. “And that music he’s singing—that’s colored music, you know.”

Peggy quickly lays a mollifying hand on Steve’s knee, but he’s more resigned than angry. He’s unfortunately accustomed now to hearing racist remarks with regularity, even from people who’d seemed decent enough at first, and he’s learned to pick his battles. He covers her hand with his own and gives it a squeeze.

“You like that Nat King Cole well enough,” Evie reminds him.

“That’s different,” Tom says, frowning severely at her. “Nat King Cole is a _musician_. Respectable. He’s not _gyrating_ in front of a bunch of teenaged girls.”

“I hardly think they’d be clamoring for it,” Evie murmurs into her wine.

“Steve, have you seen this greaseball?” Tom asks, pointing a fork at Steve and pretending not to hear his wife. 

Steve hadn’t seen Elvis’s performance on the Milton Berle Show, although it had been the subject of much break room talk at work. He only remembers learning about Elvis in the future by reference, although he knows enough to be able picture what Tom’s referring to. Some of his friends had gamely attempted to demonstrate the gyrating in question for him after a few drinks, once, and he’d recognized it immediately.

“I don’t think it’s so bad,” he says shrugging. “It’s just dancing. And the songs are catchy.” The radio plays Elvis practically every other song, these days, and more than once he’s found himself singing along—badly—to _Heartbreak Hotel_ while he paints.

“It’s obscene,” Tom argues, sounding annoyed. “Right there on live television. You know what Frank Sinatra called it? ‘Deplorable.’”

“Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?” Peggy says. “Isn’t Elvis the competition?”

Tom ignores her and focuses on Steve. “McCauley, I’m surprised at you,” he chides, his tone only half-joking. “This is being watched by millions of good American families. It’s sinful. He’s thumbing his nose at decent society, and young people are buying into it, especially girls.” 

He raises his brows and lowers his voice conspiratorially. “You know, I read that they’re expecting rates of unwed mothers to increase this year. I don't think that's a coincidence.” He stabs his index finger into the table for emphasis.

“Well, if I’d known all it took was some pelvis thrusting to get teenage girls that riled up, maybe I wouldn’t have been such a wallflower in high-school,” Steve says without thinking.

Thomas looks speechless.

Evie smirks. “Modesty doesn’t become you, Steve,” she says sweetly. “I’ll bet the girls just couldn’t keep their hands off you.”

“No, it’s true,” he replies, reaching for Peggy’s hand. “I was hopeless. Just ask Pegs, she took pity on me.”

“He had his share of admirers,” Peggy disagrees dryly, but she links her fingers with Steve’s.

The topic of Elvis is tabled for the evening, and nobody jumps at the chance for dessert. 

Thomas draws him aside as they’re leaving the restaurant. “Steve,” he says heavily, “I’ll thank you not to speak that way in front of my wife.”

Steve furrows his brow, thinking back over the evening. To his recollection, he’d spent most of dinner running interference for Peggy. “In what way, Tom?”

“Talking about _pelvis thrusting_ and _riling up girls_ like that. I think we all know what you meant, and I don’t appreciate that kind of talk.” Tom’s face is stern. “I don’t want to cast aspersions on how you were raised, but where I come from, that’s not a decent thing to say in front of a lady.” 

Steve knows full well that any argument will fall on deaf ears. “Sorry, Tom,” is all he says, trying to work his expression into something resembling remorse. “Guess I had a little too much to drink.”

They shake hands while Steve mentally kicks himself. He’d let his irritation get the better of him, and he’d slipped up. He’d forgotten, somehow, that these societal mores are not just charming and quaint—they are rigidly enforced. The gaffe had been small enough, but office gossip is pervasive.

They’re both quiet going back over the bridge. Peggy is looking out the window of the cab. Steve fidgets, wondering what she’s thinking. At least in his estimation, the night had been an unqualified disaster, and Peggy had so carefully cleared her hectic schedule for it. 

“Well,” Peggy says finally, turning to him. Her expression is frank. “I never want to hear you complain about Howard being in his cups again.”

The awkward tension breaks and he groans, putting his head in his hands. “I’m so sorry,” he says, laughing helplessly. “I didn’t know he was such an ass!”

Peggy just shakes her head fondly, though he can tell she’s still a bit annoyed. “Why on earth did you agree to this in the first place?”

“He’s not like that at work!” Steve protests. “We mostly talk baseball, to be honest. And I had no idea that Evie would be so, ah—forward.” 

He reddens.

“She was a touch _coquettish_ , wasn’t she?” Peggy agrees, her mouth twitching. “I felt quite sorry for her, actually.” 

Steve is startled. “Really?” 

She has no reason to be, of course, but he knows from personal experience that Peggy has quite the jealous streak. The last time a woman had come onto him, he’d been fired upon.

She smiles ruefully. “One can't exactly blame her. Imagine, having to live with that man. I expect I'd go quite out of my head.” 

Steve feels a sudden stab of guilt. He thinks of the advertisement in the morning's paper -- a soft, pastel wife, kneeling at her husband's bedside with a breakfast tray. _Show her it's a man's world._

The advertisement had been for a necktie.

“I’m really sorry,” Steve says sincerely. “You deserved a much better night out.”

“It’s quite alright,” Peggy says airily, giving her head a regal toss. Steve can see that she’s fighting a smile. “I’m sure there’s a very lovely and very expensive way that you can make it up to me.”

* * *

When Evie unexpectedly corners him in the back stairwell as he’s leaving the HLM Christmas party, he lets her kiss him, just for a moment. He’d seen her watching him at the party, eying him boldly above the rim of her glass. When he’d caught her staring she hadn’t looked away but had held his gaze, her red lips curling up in a tiny smirk. He’d said his good-byes not long afterwards.

She presses her lithe body against his, and her tongue darts into his mouth. The hand gripping his face is surprisingly hard. For the briefest of seconds, he kisses back, almost automatically. She makes a small, pleased sound that goes straight to his gut. Then he jerks away, painfully hard, and gently but firmly pries her off of him. 

Her face is flushed and her blonde hair falling loose, lascivious in her too-tight red dress. Arousal hits him low. “C’mon, Mac,” she says in a low voice, and licks her lips unconsciously. There’s a challenge in her green eyes.

Adrenaline floods his body. For just a moment, he wants to push her up against the wall. 

He shakes his head.

“I’m married, Evie.”

She stares at him in disbelief for a moment. Then she makes a tiny sound like a scoff and draws herself up, clearly stung and unused to rejection. “Fine.”

She visibly gathers herself and adjusts her dress, her studied disdain belied by unsteady hands. “Your loss, then.” Her heels click loudly on the stairs as she hurries away from him, smoothing her hair as she goes.

He stands in the stairwell leaning against the wall, listening to the sharp report of her footsteps growing fainter. 

_Was that your first kiss since 1945?_

He curses, his erection straining unbearably against his slacks. It doesn’t mean anything—he knows it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just an involuntary reaction, but he still feels ashamed.

He thinks about the look on Peggy’s face when she’d caught him with Private Lorraine; rigid and hurt. He never wants her to look that way again.

_And then when she’s aching for it, you’ll know—they make this sound, Stevie, and—_

He doesn’t return home for hours, sure that the guilt will show on his face. When he finally screws his courage to the sticking place and walks in the front door, he finds only darkness and a note written in flawless penmanship waiting for him.

_My darling—_

_I’ve been called in on an urgent ‘matter of state’, but rest assured; come Hell, high-water, or HYDRA (heaven forbid!), I’ll be home before Christmas Eve. I love you._

_Ever yours,_

_Peg._

Steve balls up the note in his fist. He heads straight for the shower and unconsciously tries not to touch anything, somehow sure that Evie’s cloying perfume is seeping into the walls like a dark miasma.

He showers until his skin is red and raw, and then when he can’t sleep he showers again. He tells himself that hasn’t been unfaithful, and he knows that it’s mostly true—the kiss really had taken him completely by surprise. A moment of pure reflex doesn’t count, but he still feels sick with guilt. He doesn’t even _like_ Evie, not really.

 _Was that your first kiss since 1945?_

He doesn’t know why he suddenly can’t stop thinking about that unspoken tension he’d felt, once, with another sharp-eyed woman—an uncrossed line, a thing balanced on a knife’s edge. Something he’s fairly sure was never even real.

_“Soviet slug, no rifling. Bye-bye, bikinis.”_

_She looks up at him through her lashes, one hand raising the hem of her shirt just enough to reveal the tiny scar marking the smooth, flat skin of her stomach._

In the early days, she’d just enjoyed getting under his skin, that’s all.

_He leans in, anger and arousal mixing inexplicitly in his gut. His fingers are inches from the lean curve of her waist. “Yeah,” he says, matching the throaty timber of her voice, “I bet you look terrible in them now.”_

_Her lips curl into a tiny smirk._

Being with Peggy is everything he could have ever hoped for—even the idea of infidelity is anathema to him. Their partnership is sweet and loving, the very definition of romantic. Their sexual relationship is no different.

It’s comfortable.

There are no games between them, and he prefers it that way.

He stares at the dark ceiling. He does not have to justify his body’s involuntary reaction to an unexpected encounter. Any unwelcome thoughts are just some trailing vestige of restlessness, brought to the forefront of his mind by a pushy coworker’s wife bearing a mild resemblance to an old affection. 

He rolls over and tries to put the incident out of his mind entirely.

He mostly succeeds.

1957 –( _t_ )5

Peggy rests her head gently on the steering wheel and breathes, just for a moment. Once an annoyance, she’s come to think of the commute from Lehigh as vital. She needs that hour to shed the persona of Director McCauley, unflappable intelligence agent, so that she can be _Steve’s wife_. 

Of course, Steve doesn’t mind it if she talks about work—he’s genuinely interested, in fact, and he asks her all the right questions. Technically, she’s not supposed to be discussing clandestine matters of state with anyone outside of SHIELD, but the rules are a bit different when your spouse is secretly a superhero from the future. The problem is that the transition between her binary roles is growing more difficult by the day.

To offset her twin handicaps of being a woman best known as _Captain America’s onetime girlfriend_ , at SHIELD she’d been deliberately formal and even a bit standoffish with her staff from the start. Howard, of course, treats everyone with a sort of haughty familiarity, but he doesn’t have to worry about whether his subordinates respect him. Even now, she’ll occasionally feel a twinge of uncertainty as to whether she’s viewed as a capable director or as some kind of pet project of Howard’s, and she finds that projecting an imperious mien helps to reinforce the necessary air of authority she needs to do her job.

Lately, it’s becoming harder to lay down that armor when she leaves the workplace.

It scrapes at something inside her when she hears her coworkers bantering playfully about their wives, or when she’s inundated with colorful advertisements, each one extolling the warm, ladylike keeper of the hearth. It’s not that she feels she should be wearing gowns and buying pastel appliances, exactly, but she’s sometimes forcibly reminded that Steve shoulders the bulk of their household duties, and she wonders if she isn’t contributing enough to their marriage. 

She works odd hours, and is sometimes gone for weeks at a stretch. Just lately, when she’s actually with Steve, she can’t bring herself to open up to him. It’s not that she thinks he won’t understand—he knows better than anyone what it’s like to feel underestimated, after all. It’s just that she doesn’t want to undo the exhaustive effort she’s spent suppressing her fears and insecurities. She can’t afford self-doubt now.

Squaring her shoulders, she grabs her briefcase from the front seat of the car and heads inside, immediately greeted by a waft of something from the kitchen that smells heavenly. 

“Hey, there!” 

Steve is wearing a blinding grin and an honest-to-go apron over an Oxford button-up. He strides over to her as she toes off her heels and places his hands on her waist. “You’re home early,” he greets, kissing her lightly as she winds her arms around his neck. “I was going to surprise you, but this is so much better.”

It’s difficult to regularly eat dinner together because Peggy keeps such odd hours, but Steve still faithfully cooks for her every night, wrapping her portion up in aluminum if she isn’t there to eat it with him. She’d protested, at first. It’s not that Steve seems resentful of the work—quite the contrary, as he clearly takes an odd delight in domesticity. 

It’s just that she’s sure Steve hadn’t returned to play housewife to an absent spouse.

“Where are we off to tonight?” she asks him. Steve’s culinary adventures have taken them to Thailand, Spain, and India lately, the latter by far and away the winner. 

“Italy,” he announces, grinning. “An old staple with a bit of an update.”

He lets her set the table, but insists on finishing all preparations of the meal himself, serving it to her with all the grandiosity of a head chef. 

“Well, it’s bad news tomorrow, I’m afraid,” she says, once they’ve both eaten a few bites. “I’m giving you the inside scoop so that you can hear it from me first.”

Unexpectedly, his face drops, fork wilting in his grip. “What’s happened?”

She can practically see his mind racing through dozens of horrible scenarios. 

“Oh, no, not—oh, I’m sorry,” she assures him hurriedly. “It’s nothing so much a matter of state as a—the Dodgers are officially being transferred to Los Angeles. It’ll be announced tomorrow.”

He practically collapses with relief, and she feels suddenly cold. “Oh,” he says, and he lets out a short laugh. “I thought—well, I don’t know what I thought.” He runs a hand through his hair, and then gives her an awkward smile. “You know, when your wife is responsible for the safety of the free world and she tells you she’s got bad news, your mind goes to some strange places.”

He speaks earnestly, like a man with no knowledge of what might happen in the future, but she wonders what had put that look onto his face. Is he concealing his knowledge of some imminent event, or had Steve been genuine in his apprehension? He’d made it quite clear to her that his foreknowledge is limited, but sometimes she wonders at the extent of those limits. 

“I hadn’t thought,” she says apologetically, forcing down her thoughts. 

He shakes his head. “No worries.”

He uses that pithy phrase so often. She’s still never heard it from anyone else. 

There’s a short silence in which they both look at their plates, and then she asks, “Will you forgive me if I handle the clean-up?” 

Steve frowns in mock-indignation and points his fork at her accusingly. “Mrs. McCauley, pretending we don’t have a long-standing deal.”

She doesn’t point out that she’s rarely around to hold up her end of this supposed bargain—“One cooks, the other cleans,” Steve had said simply, as though merely stating the natural order of things—but the awkward moment is passed, and she tries to put the incident out of her mind. They continue eating, Steve excitedly pointing out all the little flavors he’d tried to incorporate and regaling her with his odyssey of trying to hunt down the foods and spices he’d needed.

She tries to listen, but she’s a bit perplexed that he hadn’t much to say about the Brooklyn Dodgers—she and Howard had both groaned when they’d heard the news, and they’d been trading increasingly ridiculous predictions about Steve’s reaction all day.

“I thought you’d be a bit more upset,” she admits finally, and Steve looks at her, his forehead creasing in confusion. 

After a moment, his face clears. “Oh, the Dodgers!” he says, and shrugs. He looks down, poking absently at his meal. “Well, I already had to get used to it, kind of.” 

And there it is, that look she hates—that seemingly unfocused gaze turned on things that haven’t happened yet.

“You know, most people there don’t even know that the Dodgers used to be in Brooklyn?”

She raises her brows politely, but she doesn’t press the line of inquiry. Steve might gamely answer a few questions about social attitudes or things he considers minutiae, but it’s easier for both of them if she doesn’t.

“By the way, speaking of the Dodgers,” he continues briskly, “If I have your permission—” he shoots her a quick grin, “Some of the guys from the office are getting tickets for the game on Sunday. I know it’s our day, but—”

“But nothing,” she interrupts firmly. “Especially now that it’s the last season! Go have your fun with the boys and I’ll have dinner all ready and waiting, for once.”

His grin softens into something unbearably fond. 

“You know you already give me everything I need, right?”

Her cheeks flush. She feels excessively pleased. “It’s lovely to see you like this,” she says, busily ladling more pasta. “All those friends.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, giving his head a quick shake. “It’s still hard to believe, sometimes. I wasn’t too popular back in the thirties.”

“Well, they just didn’t know what they were missing,” she says firmly. 

Steve shrugs one shoulder. “Maybe. Never really had many friends back then. I missed school a lot, ‘cause I was sick. Wasn’t any good at sports, either. And then, you know, we didn’t have any money—d’you know, I used to wear newspapers in my shoes?”

He huffs a laugh. “If it wasn’t for Bucky, I don’t think I would have made it.”

She sits back. First an unprompted allusion to the future, and now talk of Bucky. Steve must be in a rare expansive mood tonight. 

“Now _he_ would have been upset about the Dodgers,” Steve adds, smiling wryly. 

Curiously, she asks, “What was he like, growing up?”

“He was basically—well, the only friend I had,” Steve says softly. “Dunno why, he was a pretty popular guy himself, but he just—took a shine to me, I guess. I was lucky, you know? He was always looking out for me, even when—well, you remember, Pegs. I wasn’t much to write home about.”

It’s certainly not how she remembers it, but she just waits and lets him reminisce. She knows better than anyone how time can soften memories. Warp them, even. Maybe it isn’t fair, but in her mind, Barnes hadn’t been good for Steve. She’d never spoken to him after that first night in the bar, but she’d seen him from time to time—lurking on the edges of the film reels, mostly, a dark contrast to Steve, who’d always seemed to radiate an innate warmth. She’d been wholly unsurprised to learn he’d been a sniper.

“You know, before you and Erskine came along, he was the only one that really saw me, you know? He always said I was special, that I gonna do something great. I always thought he was just tryin’ to make me feel better, but…” he trails off. “Well, he never made me feel _small_.”

Delicately, she doesn’t point out that Barnes had tried to put the moves on her, right in front of Steve—had he been remotely successful, Steve undoubtedly would have felt about two inches tall. It is, of course, entirely possible that Barnes had simply been uncharacteristically drunk that night, and that he’d otherwise been more or less the supportive friend that Steve remembers. 

She just can’t seem to shake that initial dislike, no matter how much she’d like to.

She deftly changes the subject back to baseball, challenging him to convince her that it’s not the horribly dull affair it seems, and lets her mind drift as Steve excitedly describes runs and outs and fly balls. She rests her head on her hand as she watches him gesture broadly, drawing pictures in the air.

After dinner, she cleans the dishes and wipes down the kitchen. She lures Steve upstairs and has her way with him. If it all feels a little too much like checking off "wifely duties" on the day's task list, she doesn’t admit it to herself.

1959 –( _t_ )5

Without Howard stoking its flame, the memory of Captain America fades a bit, and he joins the ranks of George Patton and Audie Murphy as just one more hero from a bygone age. Steve is very amused the first time he reads a write-up of the newest Captain America biography, which apparently goes into great detail about how the properties of the supposed super-serum were greatly exaggerated for propaganda purposes.

It’s Howard who buys the book for him, of course, as he seems to find the whole thing uproariously funny. Of course, Howard had had a hand in downplaying the effectiveness of the serum—Steve hopes that it won’t have too much of an impact on his younger self’s eventual reception, but he’s got half a century to worry about that. He isn’t going to read the book (although he’d flipped through a handful of Captain America biographies in the future, mostly out of morbid curiosity), but looking at the cover does give him an idea. 

Howard seems surprised when Steve pulls him aside one night and asks him to make another shield. “I thought you’re retired now?” he asks, brow raised. 

“I am,” Steve confirms, “But I kind of miss having it around.”

Howard looks doubtful, but shrugs. “If you say so. I mean, it won’t be the same, you know, your old shield was made of vibranium. We’re kind of out. And if we had it, I think our procurement team might frown on me using it to build a collector’s item.”

“That’s fine.” Steve actually hadn’t thought of that, but it makes sense. Wakanda isn’t on anyone’s radar at the moment. “Anything close? Adamantium, maybe?”

“I’d think tin would work just fine, if you’re really not planning to use it.” Howard looks at Steve closely. “Seriously, what’s all this about?”

Steve smiles and shakes his head. “Sorry, Howard. You know I can’t.”

He doesn’t bother asking Howard not to mention it to Peggy—Howard’s only more likely to tell her, if he does.

Howard smiles thinly. “Right. Need to know basis only.” He takes a long sip of his drink. “Sure, why not. We all like to remember the glory days, right?”

He wanders off, and if he’s a little short with Steve the rest of the party, he still comes through in the end. Less than a month later, he presents Steve with a fairly decent replica of his old shield, handing it over with a mocking little bow.

The new shield is heavier than Steve’s had been, and he doesn’t exactly have a chance to test it out, but he trusts in Howard’s expertise. It’ll be more of a symbol, anyway.

He’s already decided that at some point, he wants to use the remaining Pym particles, safely hidden away as a failsafe, and take one last trip into the future. He owes it to them. Bucky will know what’s happened, but Steve can’t just vanish—literally—from Sam’s life without a goodbye. When the time is right, he’ll take the shield to Sam. The future won’t need Steve Rogers, but it will always need a Captain America, and he quite likes the idea of passing the torch.

He’s put some thought into how he’d like to do it, if he ever manages to work up the nerve. It’ll have to be when he’s significantly older, so that they won’t try to convince him to stay, although he doesn’t think that he’ll be tempted to. 

In the future, he’d been haunted by a pervasive homesickness that had perpetually ached, like the throb of an old injury. In the beginning, that painful longing had tightened around him like a vice during long, sleepless nights, and on his worst days, he’d simply given himself over to his desperate loneliness, letting old records exacerbate the exquisite pain of _if only_.

It’s why he’d thrown himself headlong into SHIELD in the first place; he’d preferred being too busy to allow for quiet contemplation. He’d taken the inevitable teasing with good-natured humor, but he’d tried his best to immerse himself in the twenty-first century. He’d dutifully watched _Star Wars_ and listened to “classic” music written well after his time. 

The melancholy still lingered in him long after he’d believed that he’d finally let the past go. No matter how comfortable he’d felt with the Avengers, he could never truly stop casting his mind back to a thousand excruciating what-ifs, in the end. 

The abrupt cessation of that pain was almost jarring, at first; he’d lived with it for so long that its sudden absence made him feel off-balance. Sometimes he can’t believe it’s really gone, and he reflexively probes the spot in his mind like a phantom limb. Although he hasn’t felt any homesickness for the life he’d known in the future, he sometimes thinks that if he allows himself to indulge in nostalgia—like worrying at an old wound—that pain will return, inverted. Physically, he’s more or less the same as he’d been when he’d left to return the stones, and he wonders whether he’ll feel any regret once he’s aged past the point of no return.

He hides the shield away, where he’s sure that Peggy will never find it, resolving to put it out of his mind until the time is right. As he gently pries up the floorboards, he allows himself to imagine what their reaction will be, when they see him again. He’ll have to figure out some way to soften the blow—simply popping back out onto the platform an old man would cause panic. What will it be like, seeing a still-young Bucky and Sam through his aged eyes? Sam will probably tease him for being an old man, but he’ll undoubtedly approve of Steve’s decision. 

He’s less sure about Bucky. He’d taken the news well enough at the time, but Steve can imagine him feeling a bit abandoned—Bucky will be around long after everyone except Thor is gone. It’s really the only thing he feels a twinge of guilt about, when he thinks about the Future. Will Bucky envy him, when he sees him again?

Pity him?

Steve replaces the floorboards. Most days, he forgets that it’s even there.

If Howard ever says anything to Peggy about making Steve a new shield, she never mentions it to him.

1960 – ( _t_ )5

Peggy was supposed to be home from West Germany last week, but her trip is extended indefinitely after it’s announced that three thousand American troops are being deployed to Vietnam. He suspects that she’ll be flying to France next.

Steve almost doesn’t tell her that the Pratt Institute had asked him to give a guest lecture because he knows that she’ll feel terrible missing it, but he’d rather not keep secrets from her if he doesn’t have to. 

It goes as well as can be expected, and perhaps it’s the familiar feeling of being onstage that puts him into a nostalgic mood. It’s still light out when he wraps up, and instead of heading back home right away he decides to throw caution to the winds. 

Steve had gone to Red Hook only once when he’d first arrived in the future. It had been eerie—beyond the familiar curve of the street, nothing really resembled his memories. It had degraded even more (although he hadn’t thought that possible, once), and clapboards and cobblestones had been replaced with dull concrete. When he’d visited, the wreckage of Hurricane Sandy had still been strewn across the streets. Later, he’d looked it up on the internet to learn that in his absence, Red Hook had apparently become known as the “crack den of America”.

This is much worse.

Everything is at once familiar and sullied, smaller and meaner than what he remembers. He walks slowly down the street, head down and hat pulled low over his face, unwelcome in his own memories. Although he keeps half-expecting familiar faces to step out of the shadows, he doesn’t recognize a single soul hurrying by. 

Red Hook is dirtier than he remembers. The Gowanus Expressway and the Battery Tunnel have cut it off from the rest of the borough and its been left to rot like a dead limb. Hard-eyed men glower at him, and he’s suddenly conscious of what he must look like in his oiled briefcase and well-cut coat. 

Inexorably, he makes his way up to the old apartment building he and Bucky had once lived in. It had been long-since torn down by the time he woke up in 2011, but in 1960 it’s still standing, although it looks like it might fall down any day of its own accord. 

He starts when he recognizes a familiar face, a gaunt ghost from another life that might as well have belonged to another person.

Maisie Parker had lived in the tenement next door to the Barnes’ when they were kids, but she’d been about three years older than Bucky and hadn’t paid him any attention. She was as much of a glamor puss as someone poor as they were could have possibly been, and she’d somehow gotten her hands on enough hydrogen peroxide to bleach her hair platinum blond.

Bucky had been wild about her. He’d called her ‘Daisy Maisie’ and he’d waxed lyrical about how she looked just like Jean Harlow (a personal favorite of Bucky’s, who had always loved blondes). Steve always thought that once Bucky hit his teens, he might have actually had a shot at her, but she’d married early, at seventeen. The rumor was that she’d been sleeping around and had gotten herself pregnant.

It’s shocking to see how old Maisie looks now. Her hair is mouse brown again, grey creeping into her temples, and there are lines down the sides of her face, accentuating her dour expression. The yellow of an old bruise covers one eye. 

She sits on the steps of a dull square tenement, smoking a cigarette. She’s not dressed warmly enough for the biting air, and her chapped hands have turned an angry red from cold. She watches Steve approach her with an utter lack of curiosity, and snorts inelegantly when he tips his hat.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he starts, and then stops, lost. What does he say? 

She breaks the silence, her voice a smoker’s rasp. “You lookin’ for Joe?”

“No,” he replies hastily, “No, I—I’m sorry, I just thought I recognized you. Are you Maisie Parker?”

Her mouth sours. “Maisie Gould,” she corrects, looking suspicious. “What for?”

“I’m sorry, I just—you used to live near Leaman Place, right?” 

Steve takes her silence as assent. 

“I just wondered if you remembered a family who used to live there. Barnes?”

She squints at Steve. “That you?” she asks doubtfully, running an eye over his frame. 

Steve shakes his head. “Uh, no. My uh—cousins. We used to play together when we were kids.”

Maisie takes another drag on her cigarette and shrugs. “Used to live next to a lotta people.”

“Uh, George and Winifred? They had a girl and a boy; he would have been almost our—your age.” 

She looks blank for a second, and then sudden recognition briefly lights her face. “Yeah,” she says, “Yeah. Barnes. George, right? He had that—”

She gestures with the cigarette, approximating the hooked scar across George’s nose; his most prominent feature, courtesy of the Kaiser’s artillery.

“Right.”

“Mean drunk,” she says, no inflection in her voice. “Use t’ hear him yellin’ at his kids.”

“Yeah.” Another thing Bucky had never really talked about. “Do you remember his son? Bucky?”

She rubs at her eye distractedly, cigarette ash falling onto her lap. “Mmm. Lotta kids runnin’ around back then. Which one was he?”

“Brown hair,” Steve says uselessly, already knowing that she won’t remember Bucky. She doesn’t care enough to try. “Real—real good-looking.”

Maisie shrugs carelessly, cracked hands idly scratching at a spot on her dingy dress. “Nah.” She glances at Steve, and she must see something on his face because she adds, unconvincingly, “Sorry. What happened to him?”

Steve shakes his head. “Gold-starred,” is all he says. 

She snorts again, in what Steve is beginning to realize is a characteristic fashion. “Lucky,” she sneers. “Least he got out of this shit.”

Steve doesn’t bother to say goodbye, leaving the one-time Daisy Maisie to her stoop. Maybe, somehow, it’s a good thing that Bucky never came back from the war. 

He walks quickly back through the streets of Red Hook, now evening-dark and ominous in a way they never were to him in another life. 

He doesn’t come back again.

1962 – ( _t_ )5

Peggy sits on the edge of her desk and stares out over the DC skyline. It’s almost eleven, and the entire SHIELD satellite site is empty—on a normal day, maybe, there would still be staff here burning the midnight oil, but she expects that they’re all home with their families tonight. 

“ _Jesus_ , there you are,” Howard calls from the doorway, startling her.

He strides into her office, clearly torn between irritation and relief. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere, why aren’t you back at the hotel? I even told the front desk it was a matter of national security and they still wouldn’t let me in.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, turning back to the window. “I just wanted to look at the draft statement again. I couldn’t sleep.”

“Yeah, well, none of us can.” He leans on the desk beside her and pulls a box of Lucky Strikes from his jacket pocket, tapping a cigarette out into his hand. “Should’ve known you’d be here.” He glances up. “You might want to turn on the overhead, you look like the Phantom of the Opera sitting here in the dark.”

“The glare obscures the view. I wanted to look out at the city.”

He lights a cigarette and takes a long drag. The tip winks orange in the dim light. “Watching for incoming missiles?”

“Very funny.”

“You realize that if anything happens to you I’ll have to answer to Captain America,” he tells her, holding out the Lucky Strikes.

She forces a smile and reaches over to slide a cigarette out of the box. “That may be the least of either of our worries right now.”

Howard grimaces. “You said it, kid. Anything come through yet?”

She shakes her head. “Our contacts are still dark.” She exhales a plume of smoke at the window. She rarely smokes around the house—Steve doesn’t like the smell—and it’s become something of a secret vice. “You said you were looking for me? Anything new?”

“Yeah,” he says. He holds his cigarette between his lips as circles back around the desk and starts to open the drawers, rummaging through the paperwork. “I refuse to believe you don’t keep any scotch around here.”

“I’m a professional, I’m afraid.”

He snorts. “Drinking is an essential part of politics. How else do you get people to agree on anything?” 

“News?” she reminds him. 

“Oh—no,” he says, shaking his head and rejoining her. “Not really. Scali was making some noise, but it wasn’t anything we didn’t know about earlier.”

He pulls a flask from his jacket pocket and holds it up. “Not nearly enough, but it’ll do. ‘Always be prepared.’” He tilts it toward her in a mock-toast.

She snorts. “The eternal boy-scout.”

“Semper fi.” He takes a sip and makes a face, and then looks at her. “Speaking of boy-scouts—” he starts, and she sighs, interrupting him.

“I know what you’re going to say, Howard,” she says wearily. “And no.”

“Nothing?” he asks incredulously. He takes another, much longer, drink. “Jesus. Not even a thumbs up or down?”

She shrugs listlessly. “He says he doesn’t remember this one way or another. For what it’s worth, he doesn’t seem very concerned, either.”

Howard sighs and scrubs at his forehead. “Alright, well, so we can take that as a positive sign, I guess.”

She nods. She doesn’t tell Howard that Steve’s relatively blithe attitude is the only reason that she’d even agreed to take the trip to Washington in the first place. She knows that, fantastical consequences or not, Steve would never let her willingly walk into certain danger, let alone into a nuclear blast zone. 

“Can’t you lean on him a bit? You know, use your feminine wiles? Or maybe just nag a little more?”

“Howard—”

“That’s what Maria does, you know, when we supposedly _need_ new furniture—”

 _“Howard_.” 

He stops, and raises his hands in apology.

“ _Sorry_ , I’m sorry. I’ll stop. Truce?” He offers her the flask, his smirk unrepentant.

Despite herself, she huffs a laugh. “Ugh, keep it. That’s punishment enough for you.”

He shrugs, taking another pull, and they lapse into silence for a moment. 

“It’s hard for me, too,” she admits, feeling him turn to look at her. “But then I think—he’s right, you know. What if he tells me something, and then whatever I do with that information changes things for the worse?”

“What, he thinks you’re gonna start World War Three all by yourself?”

She elbows him gently. “Of course not. But if things don’t play out exactly as they’re supposed to, who knows what could happen?”

“Right,” Howard says skeptically. 

Peggy can tell that he wants to say something else, but he just shrugs and shakes his head. “You know best.” 

They stand quietly together for a moment, staring out over the capital. 

“Why were you looking for me, earlier?” Peggy asks suddenly, turning to look at him. “You still haven’t said.”

Howard shrugs slightly, avoiding her gaze. “I dunno. World might end, and all. I guess I just didn’t want to be alone.”

She smiles wanly.

Ever since SHIELD had gotten wind of the missile site photos, Howard’s been pressing Peggy to ask Steve for more information. It puts her in an uncomfortable position, but she understands why he does it. It’s increasingly difficult not to do it herself. She’s quite sure that if she ever really pushes, Steve will bend for her—but then, a line will have been crossed. They’ll have to give up the fiction that they’re both on the same page; that Steve hasn’t read ahead to the end. Worse, still, whatever he tells her will influence their actions in ways that could ultimately prove disastrous.

She knows that Steve is right—that his continued silence is safest, and the best way to ensure a good outcome.

At the same time—the world is on the brink of nuclear war. 

A word of reassurance might be nice.

1963 – ( _t_ )5

It’s taken over eighty years, but finally Steve sees his first grey hair. It’s just one—no companions that he can see—but he’s fairly sure of it. His first reaction is shock; at one point, he’d worried that he would live for hundreds of years. He breaks into a grin. It feels incredible, to finally be a part of the world; to be able to watch himself age and change along with it. 

His grin fades as he thinks about Peggy’s reaction. He’s still confident that he made the right decision in going back, but as they get older he sometimes wonders about the full life she’d known with her other husband. Peggy’s forty-five, and although to Steve she’s still as beautiful as the day he’d first met her, he knows that the lines of age that crease her sweet face bother her, mostly because Steve looks a well-preserved thirty. Will she be pleased, at this first definite sign of aging? Or will she compare the time it took for him to receive one grey hair to the years she’s spent dying her own? 

It’s not a particularly good week for it. Peggy’s taken the President’s assassination as a personal failure, although SHIELD couldn’t possibly have anticipated the actions of a psychotic loner. Although she’s accepted both that Steve isn’t a history book and that he won’t be able to tell her these things, things were tense between them during the missile crisis. Afterwards, she’d confessed that she’d been hurt that he couldn’t at least have offered her some assurance that the country wasn’t about to go up in flames, and he’d felt a massive pang of guilt.

“I’m sorry,” he’d told her. “All I can tell you is that everything will turn out alright, in the end.”

Her smile hadn’t quite reached her eyes, but she’d let him kiss her. Things are fine between them now, but he can tell that sometimes she begrudges him his silence, just the smallest bit.

He sits on the bench, staring out onto the park and marveling at the children playing. He might have met them already, only they’d have looked older than he is now. He can’t help but smile at how nice it is that everyone’s engaging with each-other and not staring into their phones. He barely notices when another man eases onto the opposite side of the bench.

Steve glances to his left. The man is old—maybe in his late seventies—and it hits Steve that the man might well be a World War I veteran. The realization is almost as jarring as the time he met a man in his nineties who'd claimed to have stormed Omaha Beach.

They sit in comfortable silence for a few moments, and then the man says suddenly: "Was the Russians."

"What?" Steve asks, startled. The man nods, still not looking at him. "Ayup," he says, in a twangy accent Steve can't quite place. "They killed that crazy Oswald 'fore he could talk."

Back in the future, Steve had read only a small bit about the JFK assassination, and even less about conspiracy theories. As far as he remembers, however, most theories centered around the Vice President and the CIA. Everyone's attributing almost everything to the Russians these days, though.

"How do you think?" Steve asks, humoring the old-timer. It's another thing he'd missed—the way people used to talk to each-other. In the future, people are loathe to strike up conversation with strangers, and thanks to ubiquitous cell-phones they don't need to.

"Knew something like this would happen after that Mis-sile Scare," the man says seriously. "Got a son who reads up on this stuff. Says them Russians got all that high-tech stuff the Nazis were making during the War. Right outta science fiction. Like that film, d'you see it? What's it called?"

"I don't know," Steve says, his smile fading. He knows the man is just another scared American, looking for someone to blame in the wake of the assassination. The Russians are as good a target as anyone, but the man's unintentionally hitting a little too close for comfort.

The man snaps his fingers. "The Man-churian Candidate, d’you see that one? D’you see it? I'm telling you. Russians, boy."

Steve hadn't seen it. Not entirely. Peggy had wanted to see it, and Steve, not knowing what it was about, had gone with her to the theater. They hadn't gotten halfway through before Steve had to make an excuse to leave. 

He's mostly at peace with how he’d left things with Bucky—as far as he can recall, Bucky hadn’t seemed to have begrudged him his decision. Seeing Brooklyn had brought back some wistful memories, but really no more or less than he'd felt the first time around, when he'd thought that Bucky had died falling off a train in 1945. The movie had forcibly reminded him that somewhere, this is happening to the Bucky of this world, now—that while he's living with Peggy, Bucky is being tortured and brainwashed into submission.

He stands to leave without making an excuse to the old man, and is struck by a sudden, horrible thought. The file on the Winter Soldier had been sparse, and most of his missions weren't listed anywhere they could find. It's possible that the old man is right. Maybe it was the Russians who killed JFK after all. 

Maybe it was Bucky.

He goes home and cleans the house from top to bottom. Peggy normally works until at least five o'clock on Saturdays, and it's a nice little surprise for her when she returns. They go out to eat at a nice restaurant, and they talk about going dancing but they don't. They come home, and they make love and she falls asleep in his arms. Very carefully, Steve doesn’t think about the Future. It’s almost perfect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're finally out of the fifties and starting to dig into the actual story! 
> 
> I don't think Steve would have stood for sexism or racism, but if he wanted to live a successful life in the 1950s, he likely would've had to have shrugged off an awful lot of it.
> 
> A quick note about Natasha -- I loved her relationship with Steve, particularly in the Winter Soldier. I think that the occasional sexual tension between them would have probably remained unresolved, but I also think that it's a bit difficult reconciling their borderline-dark banter and physicality with the more wholesome, courtly relationship he would have likely had with Peggy. Can't imagine him slamming her up against a wall (or her allowing it).
> 
> Historical footnotes: 
> 
> You can assume that basically all historical backdrop is mostly accurate. Half the point of this exercise was a determination in how Steve would really fare living through it all. 
> 
> The bit about women running is true. Kathrine Switzer managed to register for the Boston marathon under her initials in 1967, and was attacked during the race.
> 
> Both ads - the mustard ad and the necktie ad - were also real, and not NEARLY as bad as some of the ones I looked at!
> 
> Sinatra really did call Elvis 'deplorable'. He also called his music a 'rancid smelling aphrodisiac.' Apparently, after his appearance on the Milton Berle show, Elvis used to be shot from the waist up during his performances.
> 
> John Scali was an American news correspondent who became a go-between during the Cuban Missile Crisis.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Interlude.

2027 – ( _t_ )1

Stark Tower—or Avengers Tower, as they’re trying to call it again—is eerily quiet. Before the Snap, there would’ve been hundreds of workers and tourists milling through the lower floors. After the Return—well, for a while there, they’d housed a lot of the displaced, but most people have long-since fled the cities by now.

They’d turned the rest out years ago. It had been too dangerous, keeping track of so many unfamiliar faces—far too easy for someone to slip in unnoticed. They can’t afford to be kind, these days.

It’s one in the afternoon and Clint thinks that he could probably wander around the Tower for hours and not see a single soul. Some days, that’s preferable, but right now he feels strangely lonely. Since the debriefing yesterday of what he gathers had been a disastrous two weeks somewhere out near Morag, everyone’s been holed up in their respective apartments, licking their wounds. Every time a mission ends unsuccessfully and they come home empty-handed, the general malaise that infects the Tower like a creeping black mold seems to grow thicker. Clint was supposed to have gone on that mission, actually, but he’s still healing from an infected, month-old stab wound that’s proving surprisingly stubborn.

For lack of something better to do, he decides to head down to the garage workshop on the off-chance that Peter might be down there. Lately, Peter’s taken to spending his downtime in the workshop, tinkering with what appears to be various abandoned Stark projects. 

When he gets close, he hears the small, unmistakable clink of metal on metal, and for a moment he imagines that Tony is back, puttering around his workshop. It’s been almost five years but it’s still disconcerting, walking around a Stark Tower bereft of its maker. He keeps expecting to see Tony rounding a corner, impeccably dressed and talking a mile a minute. Clint had never been as close to Tony as Banner or even Nat had been, and he’d thought he hated him for a good stretch there even after he’d gotten off the Raft. Now, in the Tower, he feels Tony’s absence like a missing limb. Nobody left is much of a talker—not even Parker, these days—and the silence is deafening.

When he rounds the corner he sees Barnes, hunched over with a screwdriver carefully inserted into an open panel of his arm. Barnes looks like he’s completely absorbed in his task and gives no sign that he’s heard Clint, but he also doesn’t so much as glance up when Clint pulls up a stool to sit beside him. It’s just one of the many ways Barnes seems so different from Steve, who’d always tried to downplay his abilities, aw-shucks just-one-of-the-guys, unless they were in the middle of a fight. 

“Shuri not around?” Clint asks.

Barnes just shrugs, although Clint sees a faint crease appear between his eyes. He twists the screwdriver harder, and then winces at a faint electrical whine. Clint knows that Barnes blames himself for T’Challa’s death, because he was still in hiding when it happened. Shuri doesn’t blame him, of course; none of the Avengers were in Wakanda when the Kree attacked, and by the time anyone had arrived it was too late. Since taking refuge in Avengers Tower, she’s become their sometime resident mechanic, but Clint thinks that Barnes would rather die than ask her for help.

“You know, I bet Peter could help with that,” he offers, knowing that Barnes won’t like that option any better. Barnes ignores him, but Clint isn’t bothered.

Barnes had vanished like smoke the day that Steve had returned to the past (apparently briefly reappearing as an old man, according to Sam, something Clint is honestly relieved that he hadn’t had to witness). Barnes hadn’t exactly been an Avengers fixture, and anyway the world was in a state of chaos after the Snapped returned, so nobody had really noticed his absence at first. 

Months later, halfway through an interminable conference of Avenger representatives and government officials struggling to compile an organized roster of all known super-powered beings currently on Earth, General Ross had caught them all off-guard by adding, wearily, “And I don’t suppose anyone knows where our _other_ hundred-year-old war criminal has run off to?”

Later, when Clint brought it up, Sam had cut him off, his face tired. “Look, I chased that asshole for two years and found nothing. Unless he blows up another building, we are not gonna catch that guy.”

Clint had let it drop, but he’d felt a little bad about nobody even noticing Barnes’ disappearance (even if he hadn’t known the guy at all, except as Steve’s old friend who’d indirectly gotten Clint put under house arrest). Privately, he’d assumed that Barnes had probably committed suicide, and hadn’t given the matter any more thought until Barnes had unexpectedly showed up in response to Wanda’s psychic distress call. 

Barnes is as cold and taciturn as Steve had been warm and encouraging, but Clint can’t help but feel sorry for the guy. It’s not even the brainwashing thing, which he knows first-hand is an incredibly shitty experience. It’s just that Clint thinks it must suck to finally get the chance to stop fighting for a bit, just to have the one person who _gets_ you leave forever. 

Clint knows a little bit about that, too.

And, fine—maybe it’s just that the _idea_ of Barnes, an one-time Russian assassin who undoubtedly has a lot of red in his ledger, reminds him a little bit of Natasha. Bad jokes and unflagging persistence had finally worn _her_ down, so now he refuses to be deterred by Barnes’ icy glare.

"So how was working with Carol?" Clint asks, waggling his eyebrows, and that finally gets a reluctant snort out of Barnes.

With Thor sidelined and Steve gone, Carol is by far the best fighter and tactician they have. She’s very good at what she does, but she also annoys the hell out of him. He gets that she’s some kind of super-special cosmic being or whatever, but her air of superiority grates; she doesn’t even try to pretend that they’re equals, and she doesn’t let them forget it, either. There’s no team-bonding here, not this time; no celebratory beers after a successful mission or inappropriate quips in the thick of combat. She gives her no-nonsense orders and the rest of them fall in line, and if they’re lucky everybody returns alive. 

From the start, it was immensely clear that no one else shared his petty dislike. Instead, they’d all rallied around her—even Wanda, intemperate and volatile after Vision’s death, and Strange, clearly accustomed to being the brains of every operation he’s party to. Barnes, naturally, hadn't mentioned his feelings one way or another, but once or twice while Carol talked, Clint thought he'd seen a flash of irritation on Barnes’s normally-expressionless face.

After one particularly grueling trip to a remote and extremely hostile planet that had turned out to be a false lead, Barnes had outright refused to attend the debriefing that Carol still insists on after every mission. He'd claimed that he had to finish field-dressing his leg (which had been admittedly disgusting), but Clint had latched on and needled him relentlessly about it until had Barnes finally given up.

"She just bugs me," he’d muttered at last, and Clint had laughed uproariously. He doesn’t know what had made him feel more victorious—that he’d finally gotten someone to admit that Carol annoyed them, too, or seeing the reluctant half-smile that had softened Barnes’ face as he shook his head at Clint’s excessive crowing. 

The next time Carol had given one of her lectures, Clint had flicked his eyes over to Barnes only to find the erstwhile Winter Soldier staring straight back at him with the tiniest of smirks on his face. It’s been something of an inside joke ever since, and while it hasn’t exactly turned them into friends, it’s made Barnes ease up just a bit around him. He’s got a dry sense of humor that surfaces every once in awhile in a laconic drawl startlingly different from his usual monotone, and it’s twice as funny when it’s undermining the resident authority.

Of course, it's not quite as amusing now that there aren't as many people left to extol Carol's virtues. Like them, she's desperately trying to stop what’s increasingly looking inevitable, and Clint knows that as the physically strongest among them, she's feeling the weight of responsibility harder than anyone. He's seen it before, with Tony and with Thor. He doesn't think she'll crack like the latter (she seems far too steady for that), and he likes her well enough, now, but they all have to find levity where they can.

He perches on the table next to Barnes and watches him poking at the arm. It’s disconcerting. “That’s creepy,” he offers, and Barnes just grunts in return. “Is it gonna be a problem?”

Barnes shrugs. “Shouldn’t.”

“That’s why I like you, you make me feel so safe.”

Barnes shoots him an amused glance. “Don’t worry, I’ll still be able to hold your hand.”

“Funny guy.” Clint glances around. “Didn’t Tony used to keep a mini-fridge around here, somewhere?”

Barnes shrugs again. “Ask the robot.”

Barnes still refuses to talk directly to FRIDAY. Clint can’t tell if he still feels guilty about what had happened with Tony, or if he simply dislikes the idea of an ever-present artificial intelligence watching him constantly. To be fair, FRIDAY still insists on addressing him as “Sergeant Barnes”, which he seems to have a visceral reaction to. Barnes had resisted moving into the Tower right up until New Asgard had been wiped out.

“FRIDAY?” Clint calls. 

To your right, beneath the imaging system, sir,” she tells him smoothly. 

Barnes twitches.

Clint thinks he detects a faint note of disapproval in her voice, but it’s after noon, and he deserves a drink.

Although he’s never seen Tony drink anything other than top-shelf liquor or wine, Clint manages to find a six-pack of Heineken behind the scotch in the back of the fridge, which is too big to reasonably be classified as ‘mini’.

“You want one?”

“Can’t get drunk.”

Clint rolls his eyes. “There are other reasons to drink beer, you know,” he tells Barnes, offering him a bottle.

Barnes frowns as he examines it from a distance, his mouth set in a disdainful moue. 

“C’mon, I can’t day-drink by myself, it’s fucking maudlin,” Clint says, prodding Barnes with the bottle. “Be a team player.”

Barnes mouth twitches. “Never leave a man behind,” he concedes dryly, accepting the beer. 

“Attaboy,” Clint grins, twisting as he looks around for the bottle-opener.

Barnes tugs the bottle out of his grip. He flicks off the cap with his metal thumb, and then hands it back. 

“That’s handy,” Clint says, watching as Barnes flicks the cap off his own beer. Barnes takes a sip, wrinkling his nose at the taste.

“You know, Steve used be able to get pretty buzzed on Thor’s Asgardian stuff,” he offers. “We can see if we’ve got any of that left?”

Barnes’ expression flattens. He sets down the beer with more force than necessary and turns away, savagely rifling through a box of tools.

Clint mentally kicks himself. For a second, he’d forgotten how much Barnes seems to dislike talking about Steve.

It’s not like Steve comes up much, these days.

They’re both quiet for awhile. Clint drinks steadily while Barnes finally selects what looks like an Allen wrench and goes back to fiddling with his arm. He must decide that the Heineken is okay, because he stops to take occasional sips.

When he’s finished with his beer, Clint peels at the bottle label. “You think this is going to work?”

Barnes looks at him.

“All of it. Strange’s—plan, or whatever.”

Predictably, Barnes shrugs. “I don’t know. What did you think the first time?”

“Fuck, who knows,” Clint mutters. He thinks about standing on the platform. Nat grinning at him. Everyone excited, hopeful, all-hands-in like a youth soccer team. 

He kicks the bottle cap near his foot and listens as it skitters across the floor. “You want another one?”

* * *

Two beers later, Clint is feeling a buzz and he’s pretty sure that Barnes is only pretending at maintenance in order to spend more time with Clint. He’s since come to the conclusion that Barnes just doesn’t want to admit that he enjoys anyone’s company, weirdly intent on preserving his unapproachable exterior.

“You know, you should really make up with FRIDAY,” he tells Barnes. “She can play music, even movies—it’s pretty neat. FRIDAY! Play something for Bucky, here.”

The loudspeaker obligingly bursts into what Clint is fairly sure is the State Anthem of the Soviet Union.

Barnes recoils, his expression instantly transforming into murderous rage. His head jerks up towards the ceiling and his eyes dart around the rafters furiously, as though he can pinpoint exactly where FRIDAY is housed. 

Clint explodes with laughter. 

Barnes turns his head sharply to glare at him, his scowl deepening. He looks like a haughty cat that’s been caught doing something ridiculous. It’s even funnier with the bombastic horns and Russian chorus backing him up. Clint doubles over helplessly, not caring that a metal fist might crush his head in at any second.

“Your _face_ ,” he wheezes, his eyes starting to water.

Barnes shakes his head slowly, a reluctant smile tugging on his lips. “Fuck you, Barton,” he growls, snatching Clint’s beer out of his hand, and that sets Clint off all over again. He bangs his hand gleefully on the table.

The music cuts out abruptly. Clint’s laughter sounds unnaturally loud in the sudden silence.

“Hey, FRIDAY,” Clint protests, wiping tears from his eyes. “C’mon, why’d you stop? He was enjoying it! _Ow_!” 

He rocks back from the punch to his shoulder, still cackling.

“Captain Danvers is requesting your presence in Conference Room Three,” FRIDAY informs them in her faded voice.

Clint stops laughing. 

Barnes looks away.

“Wow, already?” Clint says, trying to keep his voice light. “You guys just got back.”

Barnes sets down the bottle. “New lead, I guess.”

“Or an attack,” Clint grimaces. “No rest for the wicked.”

He thinks about making a Carol joke as they make their way upstairs, but in the end he decides not to. 

Barnes doesn’t look at him once during the briefing. Clint wonders if he regrets the brief moment of levity.

He’s grimly pleased when Shuri reluctantly clears him for the mission, the tight look on her face telling him that it’s a close call. As bad as it is out there, there’s nothing worse than waiting around to find out who might not come back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No historical footnotes (shockingly). Let me know what you think!


	6. Chapter 6

1965 – ( _t_ )5

In the Future, Steve had long-since learned to cope with the fact that he’s not only famous but the subject of several ill-advised films and an HBO miniseries. He’d never actually watched them (although Tony had found it greatly amusing to play him YouTube clips of select scenes), although he had read the most popular-seeming biography, mostly out of curiosity. Most of the details about his early life were completely inaccurate, and many of the conclusions the author had drawn had made him feel distinctly uncomfortable. 

So he can’t quite bring himself to watch the new Captain America biopic, starring a Robert Redford fresh off his first Golden Globe win and titled _The Star-Spangled Man_. Much fanfare is made of the fact that it’s released exactly twenty years after Captain America’s heroic sacrifice.

Peggy takes the bullet for him, and assures him afterwards that it bears only a passing resemblance to reality. “Well, you _did_ fight in World War II, so I suppose that’s close enough for Hollywood,” is how she puts it. 

The film had existed in Steve’s timeline, and he knows that it had been both a critical and commercial flop (which Redford managed to shake off with _Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid_ ). Apparently, Redford’s version of Steve falls in love with a French resistance fighter, so Peggy hadn’t made it into the film. She takes great delight in pretending to feel jilted, playing the scorned woman and teasing Steve about his supposed great French love affair. 

“By the way,” she calls, busily rolling her hair up for bed, “We’re meeting Howard and Maria for dinner in Manhattan next week.”

Steve groans. He’d known that Howard would eventually become something of an alcoholic, but experiencing it firsthand has been trying, to say the least. Howard’s not quite as mean a drunk as his son will be, but he does have a slightly nasty streak, which just lately is manifesting as pointed remarks about Captain America. Steve doesn’t think Howard would ever go so far as to reveal Steve’s secret (and at any rate, he’s not likely to be believed), but some of his comments are hitting too close to the mark for comfort.

Peggy sighs. “Just—try, won’t you? He’s going through rather a lot, lately, and you know he doesn’t mean half of what he says.”

“Well, the half he _does_ mean is really starting to smart.”

Peggy doesn’t reply, but Steve sees her tighten her lips in frustration. He knows she doesn’t like playing referee between the two of them—her loyalty will always lie with Steve, but she also works with Howard on a daily basis, and there’s a wholly different kind of bond between them. Steve can’t but feel left out, sometimes, when Peggy and Howard are rushing off to deal with some international crisis and he’s stuck at home with the TV. 

He resolves that he'll make more of an effort. Peggy deserves that, at least.

* * *

Dinner starts off awkward and gets worse. When they arrive, Maria is sitting stiffly and looking away from Howard, while the latter berates what must be their waiter for some infelicity of Howard’s undoubtedly complicated cocktail. Howard eventually runs out of steam—“just get me a gin, neat, is _that_ simple enough for you?”—but Steve’s good will has already evaporated. He hadn’t much liked how Tony had treated his subordinates, but Howard is infinitely worse in this regard. 

Peggy directs the conversation, occasionally kicking Steve in the foot when he’s reluctant to join in. When Peggy mentions the Captain America film in passing, Howard insists they attend the nearest showing, his sly insinuations about Steve Rogers growing louder and less subtle with every sip of gin.

“Oh, let’s!” Maria exclaims, laying a pacifying hand on Howard’s shoulder. Her eyes plead silently with Peggy. “We haven’t been to the cinema in ages.” 

Steve agrees mainly to placate Howard, whose drunken vehemence is beginning to worry him.

It’s not nearly as bad as he expected, at least at first. Peggy was right when she said that they’d basically made it up as they went along. It’s more surreal than anything, seeing his life distorted through the Hollywood looking-glass. Pre-serum Steve is played by a dehydrated-looking Redford in baggy clothes, and is about twice the size that little Steve had actually been in real life. In this version, Steve goes straight from the lab to the battlefield, his stint as a glorified chorus girl erased. The brass provides him with a ready-made squadron of “special forces fighters” (the Howling Commandos, of course), and sends them straight out to rescue the captured 107th. Steve thinks it’s a strange choice, since the real version of events seems a lot more cinematic, but Peggy, oddly enough, skirts the issue.

The Howling Commandos are present, though somewhat overlooked in favor of the romantic subplot—with the exception of Gabe Jones and Jim Morita, whose portrayals are noticeably absent from the film. Falsworth and Dernier are Americans in this version (“Bugsy” and “Mutt”), and Bucky is not Steve’s best friend from childhood but a stranger from Queens, most likely to include a few cheap jokes about Burroughs rivalries. The actor playing Bucky, a Frenchman (with a bad American accent) named Alain Delon, stands out mostly for possessing the kind of pretty-boy good looks that won’t really be popular for another fifteen years. He’s clearly supposed to be the film’s brooding lady-killer, and it’s basically the only accurate thing about this version of the Howling Commandos. 

There’s one small scene that sends a sudden pang through Steve’s heart. The Howling Commandos are sitting around a campfire and talking about some “raid” on an occupied town that they’re apparently confident they’ll be able to handle between the five of them. It’s clumsy foreshadowing and would be laughable in any other context.

There’s a small moment when Delon looks at Redford, his hair tumbling down over smoldering blues eyes, and offers him a lit cigarette and a lopsided smirk. For just a moment, Steve sees Bucky. He looks away.

Just then, Peggy pats his hand. “Time to go,” she whispers, nodding to her left, where Howard has finally fallen asleep. 

Peggy whispers her excuses to Maria and they leave the theater. Steve squeezes her hand gratefully. “I’d rather thought you’d gotten the gist,” is all Peggy says.

They don’t talk on the drive home, but Peggy keeps her hand on Steve’s thigh, grounding him. 

For the first time in many years, Steve dreams of Bucky. Bucky in his blue woolen jacket, his dark hair tumbling into his eyes. In Steve’s dream, Bucky offers him a cigarette, and Steve sees that Bucky’s hand is made of steel. Bucky smiles, and where his teeth should be Steve sees instead a dripping mess of machinery and gore.

* * *

The movie had obviously been a bad idea to begin with, and to some extent she blames herself for making light of it in the first place. Maybe she’d made it seem harmless to him, or something, but for heaven’s sake—it’ll be close to forty years now, for Steve; he’ll have to make peace with it all at some point.

Of course, neither of them could have known what a fuss Howard would put up, demanding to see it. He’d hated the film when it had been screened for them, and he’d obviously only dragged them all out to the theater tonight to torment Steve. Clearly, her subtle hints about his drinking have gone unheeded, and she’ll have to actually apply the screws to him, particularly as he seems less and less concerned with keeping Steve’s secret—in fact, she gets the distinct impression that he’s enjoying holding it over Steve’s head. It may be twenty years since Captain America’s seeming demise, but it’s not so far removed that Steve would be totally unrecognizable to the discerning eye. In a rare moment of candor, Steve had once assured her that there would be a time in the Future where most people wouldn’t even remember the _name_ Omar Bradley, much less recognize him (and him not just a war-hero, but a General!) but that all seems a bit exaggerated to her.

So she’d let Howard drag them off and it had been a disaster, just as she’d thought; she’d watched Steve’s expression go from nervously amused to rigidly tight-lipped. She’s honestly got no idea if the film had come anywhere close to capturing whatever dynamic the Howling Commandos might have enjoyed, but she knows how hard it’s been for Steve, not being able to reach out to his old team. 

She hadn’t known any of them—hadn’t even met any of them aside from Barnes. They’d been invited to the Red Carpet where they’d stiffly posed for pictures, looking uncomfortable and out of place, but she’d deliberately avoided the premiere. On rare occasions, though, Steve will tell her some anecdote from the war, and she’s gathered that the Howling Commandos had given Steve his very first sense of _belonging_ , of true brotherhood—for all its faults, the movie undoubtedly must have reminded him of that camaraderie. Barnes, thankfully, was depicted as a stranger, a rival who gradually grows to respect Captain America, but of course Steve’s misplaced guilt over Barnes will have been sparked anew at just the mere mention of him. She’s just grateful she’d gotten Steve out of there before the film’s climax.

 _The Star-Spangled Man_ hadn’t been far from over when they’d left. If they’d stayed, they would have watched the Howling Commandos be sent to liberate some town with only a few Wehrmacht stragglers holding it, only to discover that they’d been tricked, and that the town is actually filled with elite HYDRA operatives. The rest is almost complete fabrication: “Bugsy” is killed, and Barnes is shot in the leg. Surrounded and trapped, the rest of the Howling Commandos are captured, and only Captain America gets away. He storms the base alone later that night, simultaneously freeing the Howling Commandos and discovering a plane carrying a nuclear bomb bound for the United States. 

In the ensuing hangar bay battle for the plane, Barnes is shot again, this time in the gut. Knowing that he’s about to die, Barnes heroically charges out to provide enough cover for Captain America to leap aboard the plane just before it takes off. The film ends with Captain America taking control of the plane and bravely pointing its nose towards the sky, as the film fades to white. The last scene is of the remaining Howling Commandos toasting sadly at a bar with a prominently placed American flag in the background, overlaid with text filling the viewers in on Captain America’s noble sacrifice and its impact on ending the war.

Absolutely dreadful, of course, and not remotely accurate. What Steve doesn’t know is that SHIELD was tangentially involved in consultations for the film. The Pentagon doesn’t just loan out military equipment on a whim, after all, and it’s required procedure for the U.S. military to review the entire proffered script before moving it forward in the approval process. Movies based upon actual historical events are analyzed by Pentagon historians for accuracy or—sometimes—for the need to substitute inaccuracies. 

Peggy and Howard had both been called in to consult with a few military officials regarding certain aspects of Captain America’s story that shouldn’t make the film. Hence, no Tesseract, no Red Skull, and no Peggy Carter. No defiance of orders in order to rescue the 107th (inexplicably, the military officials had felt that such a portrayal might tend to inspire insubordination and encourage anti-military sentiment) and no _Lawrence of Arabia_ subtext. She’s not sure why she hadn’t told Steve about her involvement—it’s not as though she’d had much say over the direction of the film, after all. He’d admitted to being discomfited at the inevitable depictions of his personal life and character, each wildly varying in accuracy, in the myriad Captain America biographies that have hit the shelves since 1945. She’d had some sense that he might feel perhaps a bit betrayed at her seeming sanction of yet another invasion of privacy. 

Howard had taken the minimization of his own role awfully hard. Steve doesn’t realize just how difficult things have been for Howard, lately; between Stark Industries stalling and Maria’s inability to conceive, he’s feeling helpless, and a bit of a failure. While Peggy had encouraged her own removal from the Captain America story, Howard probably would have loved seeing his own heroics depicted onscreen. Ever since he’d made the call about Operation Paperclip, she senses that he’s been second-guessing himself and his role at SHIELD—being a weapons manufacturer is one thing, but working directly with the likes of Armin Zola undoubtedly leads one to question one’s character. 

Peggy imagines that for all that he was once small and physically weak, Steve has never really doubted his convictions. At least as far as she knows, he’s has always had the luxury of not having to make the hard choices—his causes have always been just, and his fight righteous. Consequently, he’ll never really able to understand someone like Howard; someone who might need that recognition and acknowledgment to assuage his own self-doubt. 

Steve has trouble seeing things in shades of grey—his compass is unwavering, his categorical imperative clear. It’s why she tries so hard not to begrudge him when cataclysm strikes; when a range of nuclear missiles is pointed at the United States and he stays silent, or when the bright young President is shot, crippling the fledgling hope of a nation. She believes that he has all of their best interests at heart.

After all, even if he’s laid down his shield and abandoned the fight, he’s still Captain America.

1966 – ( _t_ )5

By pure chance, one of the first movies he’d gotten around to seeing in the Future was _The Dark Knight_. He’d read a few _Batman_ comics back in the forties when it had first debuted, and was startled to discover that Batman not only was still around, but a bonafide cultural icon.

Less surprising was that the colorful, goofy comic-book character he’d mildly enjoyed had morphed into a dark, menacing figure fighting a hopeless battle in an amoral landscape. He remembers sitting in his darkened apartment, drinking a watery beer and allowing the movie to depress him into a decided funk. The Future had felt like nothing so much as one big, gritty reboot to him that night.

So Peggy really shouldn’t blame him for enjoying the delightfully ridiculous Batman TV show that debuted earlier this year. It actually runs twice a week and she seems totally nonplussed by how eagerly he clears time for it. More than once, she asks him if this is something he’d picked up in the Future, but he assures her that he simply thinks it’s funny.

She’ll raise a brow and indulge him, but there’s no real way to explain to her how _refreshing_ it is to see a superhero actually enjoying himself, for once (probably because he’s got a handy bat-gadget for every situation, no matter how dire). She can’t know that he was actually _in_ a team of superheroes, and that the ones who had survived were eventually reduced to broken, grief-stricken bits of themselves, at the end. 

She never will, if Steve can do anything about it. After the movie incident, and the guilty malaise that had subsequently followed him for months, he’s redoubled his efforts to live in the present. He’d spent all his time in the Future thinking about the past; now that he’s back in the past, he’s determined not to let himself get caught up in memories of the Future.

His resolve seems to be paying off, for the most part. He keeps himself busy with work and friends and art. He actually sells one of his paintings—it goes for a measly seventy-five dollars, but he’s surprised by how elated he is. An ostentatious bouquet appears on their doorstep with congratulations from Maria and Howard, who’s making great efforts to curb both his drinking and his tongue. 

Peggy, of course, falls all over herself with beaming pride, even buying him a cake with a paintbrush frosted on the top. They’re both being ridiculously over-the-top about what’s likely a fluke, but it feels like some sort of validation he’s sought all his life—it’s the one skill, after all, that he’d had before and after the serum. A talent all his own that didn’t come out of a bottle.

In the future, his art would likely have gone for an easy six-figures, just for the simple fact that Captain America had created it. That sale wouldn’t have made him happy—in fact, it would have undeniably filled him with doubt and shame. 

The night after he sells the painting, Peggy agrees to watch Batman with him, her manner faux-begrudging and happily indulgent. She curls up next to his side, and he strokes her chestnut hair, the glow of the TV illuminating its tiny glints of white. She laughs along with him at the ridiculous storyline. The costumes are flamboyant, the villain is inept, and in the end everyone goes home happy and safe. 

1967 - ( _t_ )5

“Need you to do some liaising for me,” Howard says abruptly, marching into Peggy's office without bothering to knock. He has a glass in one hand and a half-full decanter in another.

From the bloodshot look of his eyes, it’s going to be a bad day.

“Isn’t that your arena?” she returns idly, bending back down to her work. “I do all the work, and you liaise?”

“Yep,” he downs the glass in his hand, “But I don’t want to.”

She leans back and sighs. “Out with it, then.”

“Hank Pym—new consultant—wants to collaborate with NASA on a project he’s working on.”

“Well, we don’t collaborate with NASA,” she returns. “As far as I’m aware, they don’t even know that we exist.”

“Yeah, I know,” Howard waves a hand. That’s what I told him. He wants us to get us someone for him.”

“ _Get_ someone?” She raises a brow. “Rather forward, isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Howard grimaces, “He’s kind of a prick. Unfortunately, he’s a prick who might actually be on to something, so I think we’re going to have to try and work with him on this.”

He fingers the decanter absently, not looking at her. “He’s developing a formula that thinks can alter atomic relative distance,” he says, before she can ask. “Says he can use subatomic particles to reduce or increase the mass or scale of any matter, including a person.”

She raises her brows briefly. “That sounds significant.”

“A game-changer,” Howard admits, “If he can pull it off. He wants to work with the guys doing tests on astrobiology. Says he doesn’t have the medical expertise to apply what he’s doing to something workable.”

“Okay,” Peggy says slowly. “Well, we could certainly look into procuring someone, then. We have a few assets at NASA—we can feel around, see who might be a good fit. Run some preliminary background checks.”

Howard shakes his head. “He doesn’t want _someone_ , he wants _that_ one.” He slaps a file down on her desk.

She picks it up, leaning forward to examine it. “‘Heinz Haber’,” she reads, frowning. “Never heard of him.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have, would you,” Howard replies bitterly. “He came over from Germany in 1948.” 

Howard’s fist is clenched so hard around his glass she worries he’ll break it. 

“Howard,” she says gently. “We do have German scientists working here, as well.”

Howard had been the one to ultimately make the call on whether SHIELD would be participating in Operation Paperclip. He’d been conflicted—they both had—but in the end he’d said that not accepting the invitation to participate in the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency would leave SHIELD on the back-foot. 

Privately, she’d also thought that he likely didn’t want SHIELD to fall behind other agencies in research and development. Howard tends to try to procure anyone he thought might outmatch him in technological achievement—sometimes she thinks it may be more competitive impulse than conscious decision.

“This guy,” Howard jabs a finger at the file, “He’s working directly under Strughold at NASA. You know anything about Hubertus Strughold?”

“No.”

“He’s the Chief Scientist at NASA,” Howard informs her, refilling his glass, “He’s the one designing the pressure suit and onboard life support systems they’re using on the Apollo programs.” 

He downs the glass in one long gulp. “And everything he knows he learned doing human experimentation. At Dachau.”

Silence hangs in the room.

“Has there been an investigation?” 

She knows before he answers that any inquiry will have been cursory. 

Sure enough, Howard gives a half-hearted sneer. “He was exonerated,” he says. “Not enough evidence.”

They both know enough about the camps to know that the SS had kept thorough, meticulous records. 

“Any evidence for this—Haber being at Dachau? Or anywhere else?”

“No.”

Officially, JIOA had stated that each scientist procured would be thoroughly investigated, and that any man found to have committed war crimes would be brought before the tribunal. Deep down, they all know the truth. Even some of the scientists at SHIELD had been plucked straight from the defendant’s list at Nuremburg.

Peggy tells herself that the data these scientists had acquired, regardless of means, should not be put to waste. That they can— _SHIELD_ can—use the resultant knowledge for the greater good: to further civilization, to save lives, so that the unspeakable acts and needless suffering might be in some small way redeemed.

Realistically, the only alternative would have been to allow that terrible knowledge to fall into Soviet hands, and to be applied to aims not quite so lofty. 

The safest hands are their own, after all.

“We have our own medical personnel, you know,” she offers quietly. “I’m quite sure they’re up to snuff.”

“I know,” he grits. “But Pym wants him brought in as a—consultant. NASA’s done all kind of tests on the astronauts already—you know, depressurization, and—oxygen deprivation…”

He trails off, his eyes filling. 

She looks away discreetly and quietly arranges the papers on her desk, ignoring the choked-off sounds. 

After a moment, she hears him blow out a breath and mutter a curse. She looks up, her face carefully composed. His eyes are red-rimmed but his expression is calm. 

“I’ll do it,” he says dully. His face is grey. The glass in his hand is empty, and so is the decanter. 

“Are you sure?”

He gives his head a single hard shake. “You think I _want_ him in here? Working with _Zola_?” he bites wearily. He rakes a hand through his hair, not looking at her. “Christ. They’re probably old pals.”

“Howard—”

“ _Don’t_.” He holds up a hand, turning his face away. “Please.”

“Alright,” she says, gently. 

He leaves the empty decanter in her office, and she runs a hand down her face, suddenly drained. 

She discreetly notifies an agent to keep an eye on Howard and to make sure that he doesn’t try to drive anywhere. Then she locks her office door and returns to her desk, folding forward and resting her head on her arms.

It’s close to seven p.m. and she should be heading home. Although she wants nothing more than to crawl into bed and forget about today, the thought of facing Steve is almost as exhausting.

When he’d first showed her the compass, she’d been moved almost to tears—that he would have kept it— _her_ —with him all that time, even when it must have been only a painful reminder to him. 

Now, when she sees it, she can’t help but think that he must have romanticized her, while he was in the Future. He’d clearly placed her on a pedestal, and no small wonder—there’d be an almost storybook simplicity to their early days together; the dashing hero and his lady fair, united against evil. Their fight was indisputably righteous, their nefarious foe easily identified by his devilish visage.

It’s been a long time since the villain of the piece was a literal monster, and things are rarely so black-and-white now. Sometimes it feels as though there is no right choice, only the lesser of two evils, or sacrifices for the greater good.

When she walks through their front door, Steve will embrace her with a loving smile and his whole-hearted adoration, an unwitting mirror reflecting the lie of the paragon he believes her to be. Would the Peggy Carter he’d sentimentalized have willingly worked alongside Nazi scientists? It’s hard enough to convince herself of the necessity of these decisions without wondering about whether she’s living up to Steve’s quixotic expectations, as well. 

True, it’s possible—likely even—that she’s being unfair to him. He’s noble, yes, but not _simple_ , and no soldier had left the war with his hands unstained. Moreover, she’s got no idea what had happened to him in the Future, and what he’d done there. Probably he’d show only understanding, if she opened up to him—of course he wouldn’t begrudge her her imperfections. Her mistakes.

But he keeps that part of himself walled off from her, and so she can’t quite be sure.

* * *

On a bright Saturday morning, Steve takes a walk through Central Park, and that, in itself, is still kind of amazing. He can take a decidedly non-athletic stroll through the park on a sunny day, no hoodie or baseball cap hiding his face, and not be bothered by a single paparazzo, fan, or nefarious actor of any kind. 

He sees a group of five teenagers sitting under a tree, passing around what’s probably a joint. One girl holds a guitar on her lap. Her waist-length brown hair is parted down the middle, held in place by red string tied around her forehead. She is startlingly pretty. She catches Steve watching and grins invitingly, waving him over. He smiles and shakes his head.

Although most of his colleagues are incensed by the constant be-ins and protests that have virtually taken over the park lately, he’s sort of getting a kick out of what they’re calling the “Summer of Love”, perhaps because he knows that it’s such a fleeting thing. He likes the energy, and even some of the music—he likes the whimsical, tie-dyed clothes and flower crowns. There’s a seeming innocence to it that he finds charming. 

For her part, Peggy seems torn between vague amusement and mild disgust at the ubiquitous hippie panhandlers in various states of sobriety and undress. A government employee reserved in appearance and demeanor both by nature and necessity, she’s must know that she’s the archetypal “man” they’re all railing against, but he doubts that she’s much bothered. He imagines that her attentions are mostly fixed on the Vietnam and Cold wars, both in full swing, and she probably doesn’t have time to consider the counterculture one way or another.

Under a bridge, he stops for a moment to admire the graffiti. On one wall is a series of large, artfully shaded letters spelling out something—a name, maybe? On the other wall is a giant cartoon of a longhaired Beatle-type wearing teashade sunglasses, floating amongst the usual detritus of “Make Love Not War” and “Emily is a Slut.” Large, bold letters across the top of the Beatle’s head proclaim: “FRODO LIVES.”

It’s not the first time he’s seen this—“GANDALF LIVES” keeps popping up, too, and it’s gotten him curious. _Gandalf_ is a character from the Hobbit, he remembers that much, so he guesses that this has something to do with the Lord of the Rings. He’d gathered that it had been wildly popular for a brief period in the 21st century, but he’d just never gotten around to watching it himself. Still, he’s pretty sure the Lord of the Rings was published in the fifties, so maybe there’s something new that he’s missing. Not for the first time, he wishes for his smart phone—he really misses having all the knowledge of the world at his fingertips, and he wonders how he’s going to figure this out. John Fitzsimmons from his office might know— he’s got his finger pretty firmly on the pop-culture pulse.

* * *

A week later, he’s leaving the bookstore with his very own copy of _The Fellowship of the Ring_. He decides to spend the day in the park, reading it, except that it turns out to be less the breezy adventure story that _The Hobbit_ had been and more a painfully dry history textbook. He finds his attention drifting more and more until he finally snaps the book shut, resolving to start up again after dinner. He feels a little abashed—according to John, _The Lord of the Rings_ has belatedly become the latest youth craze, and if high-schoolers can dig it then he certainly should be able to. 

Peggy doesn’t return home until almost eleven. He’s sitting in his favorite armchair and doggedly forcing himself through another mind-numbing treatise on hobbit society when he hears the front door open. 

Her heels sound heavy as she approaches. She looks surprised to see him still awake. 

“You’re up late,” she says, rubbing at her face. She kicks off her heels with short, irritable motions.

He stands, still absently holding the book. “I wanted to wait up for you,” he says, walking over and wrapping his arms around her.

She sags against him and sighs wearily. “Please tell me there’s something waiting for me in the kitchen.”

“In the fridge,” he replies, kissing the top of her head and releasing her.

She turns and shuffles to the fridge. Steve picks up her heels and places them against the wall.

“Everything okay at work?” he asks cautiously.

She doesn’t reply, but when she turns around, he sees her eyes flick down to the book in his hands.

“What on earth are you reading?” Her voice sounds flat.

“Uh—the Lord of the Rings,” he tells her, showing her the cover and feeling suddenly self-conscious.

She frowns at it, the lines on her forehead deepening. For the smallest of seconds, he thinks he sees a flash of derision on her face. 

He places the book gingerly back down on the chair. “Seriously, Pegs. Are you alright?”

She stands there for a moment looking past him, her shoulders drooping. For a moment he thinks that she won’t answer.

“Do you ever miss it?” she asks suddenly, her eyes flicking back up to meet his. Despite the tired set of her face, her gaze is suddenly intent.

He blinks. “Miss—”

“You don’t have to tell me anything specific,” she adds, making an impatient motion with her hand. “I’d just wondered if—you miss it? Being—Captain America? The work you’d done, I mean.”

He’s caught off-guard. Peggy hasn’t asked him a question like this since the early days—lately, even her light teasing about his retired superhero status has petered out. It’s glaringly obvious that something’s shaken her confidence at work. He can’t think of what would have happened in 1967—war crimes in Vietnam, maybe, but SHIELD shouldn’t have been involved in ground force action.

When she asks him about the future, he tries to answer it as honestly as he can. Her questions are so rare, and he doesn’t want to lie to her—it’s bad enough that every day, he makes the decision not to warn her about HYDRA’s infiltration of SHIELD. He does not want to add outright falsehoods to his many sins of omission.

He’s tried his best not to remember being Captain America—especially now, with the draft in full effect. Does he miss it?

The adrenaline rush, maybe. The sharp thrill of victory and the easy camaraderie he’d known with the Avengers. Once, he’d said that he couldn’t ignore a situation headed south, but it’s easier to overlook a temporary injustice when he’s already assured of the ultimate outcome. It’s sometimes strange, being a cog in the machine where he used to be a fulcrum of change, but he doesn’t miss that awful weight of responsibility pulling on his shoulders. 

Does he miss it?

_The Man Out of Time. Thinking you can live without a war._

He thinks about the ashen look on Tony’s face when he’d slammed his shield into his chest. 

He thinks about staring up at the Wakandan sky, knowing that he’d failed the universe.

“No,” he tells her, honestly. “Towards the end it—it just got too hard.”

She nods, her face unreadable. 

He frowns. “Peggy. C’mon, talk to me. Did something happen?”

She shakes her head, exhausted, and she suddenly looks all of her forty-nine years. “It’s nothing in particular,” she says wearily. “It’s just—well, you must understand. The compromises one has to make, sometimes.”

 _Compromise when you can. Where you can't, don't. Even if everyone is telling you that something wrong is something right._

He wants to take her into his arms again, but she turns away. He gets the sense that she might want to be alone. 

He doesn’t end up finishing the book. He decides to wait for the movie, instead.

1969 – ( _t_ )5

“Oh, Steve,” Peggy whispers reverently, her gaze fixed on the tiny black-and-white TV. “Can you believe it?”

Steve can. He’s not only been to space himself, he’s walked on another planet. He’s seen—and fought—nightmarish hordes of bona fide aliens from distant galaxies. He’s not much moved by the spectacle on the screen, and it makes him feel sour and isolated from everyone else at the watch party.

He cannot be a part of this moment in time—their faces appear suffused with an identical, rapturous glow, clearly experiencing a simultaneous wonder inaccessible to him. John Fitzsimmon’s wife—Samantha? Stella?—is crying, tears streaming silently down her face. It’s a life-changing moment for everybody but him, the Odd Man Out. 

Again.

He hadn’t spent much time reading about the moon landing in the Future. Initially, he’d been so overwhelmed with futuristic technologies straight out of the pages of Bucky’s science-fiction books that he thinks he’d have easily accepted it if he’d been told that the United States had colonized Mars. 

He wants to make an excuse to Peggy and slip out the sliding glass doors for some air, but he knows he’s got to appear just as glued to the out-of-focus screen as everyone else is tonight. Will he have to do this every time there’s a new advancement in science? Things will only get worse the closer they get to the twenty-first century, and the more familiar the technology becomes. When the pager arrives, will he have to marvel at its ingenuity while remembering that he once owned a tiny phone that could video-chat in real time?

What will he do when the _Challenger_ explodes? 

Peggy and Steve are both silent on the drive home. When they pull into the driveway, she finally looks at him.

“You could at least have pretended to be excited. I had to tell Stella that you’ve a terrible migraine.”

Steve sighs. “Peggy,” he starts, and he sees her purse her lips in a way that signals her temper flaring.

“I suppose we must all seemed quite pedestrian to you,” she says, her voice dangerously casual. “Carrying on about landing on the moon. I’m sure that in the _future_ , one can visit Jupiter on a long week-end.”

“Come _on_ , Peggy,” he sighs, suddenly bone-tired. “It’s just—a bad night, that’s all. I haven’t had one in a long time.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” she says, icily, “But you’ve ruined an absolutely _historic_ evening for me, Steve. And what do you think the others thought of your moping about? You looked absolutely ridiculous.”

He bows his head and rests it on the steering wheel. “I’m sorry,” he tells her, his voice muffled. “I am. I don’t want to fight, Pegs. Haven’t we been doing so well?”

She’s silent for such a long time that he lifts his head and looks at her. She’s looking back.

“You know, I suppose I’ve not considered how hard this must be for you, too,” she says finally. “You once told me that the Future felt like a bad dream, and that you never really fit, but—I suppose you’ll always feel a bit on the outs here, too, won’t you?”

She raises a hand to his face and strokes it. “I’m sorry,” she adds, pity and something else he can’t quite place on her face. Relief, perhaps, that she’ll never feel like Steve—the Man Out Of Time, no matter what century he’s in. He turns his head and presses a kiss into her palm.

They go inside, and they have sex, and he is gentle with her, as he always is. He runs a hand up her thigh and she obligingly spreads her legs. He rocks against her and she grips him by the shoulders, and he automatically adjusts his weight so that he doesn’t hurt her.

He’s not had many lovers, but he’s always so careful with them—he can never really allow himself to let go, to really lose himself in the moment. These days it leaves him feeling just a tiny bit restless.

He tells himself that it’s a small price to pay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...yeah! Hope you're enjoying it!
> 
> Historical Footnotes!
> 
> Alain Delon was a real French actor, and ridiculously good-looking.
> 
> You do have to run scripts by the Pentagon for approval if you're planning on using military equipment.
> 
> The Lord of the Rings was published in the fifties, and became really popular in the sixties. "Frodo Lives" was a popular hippie slogan. Led Zeppelin randomly threw in a lot of LOTR references in a lot of their songs, as well. 
> 
> Everyone mentioned here regarding Operation Paperclip was real. Hubertus Strughold really was appointed Chief Scientist at NASA. He was the subject of three investigations regarding suspected war crimes (exonerated for apparent insufficient evidence), but his connection to the Dachau experiments conveniently only really gained traction after his death.
> 
> Heinz Haber was also procured during Operation Paperclip, and he too worked at NASA (though I'm not sure in what capacity). As far as I know, there were no similar allegations made against him.
> 
> Also, we landed on the moon.


	7. Chapter 7

1970 – ( _t_ )5

_“Yesterday – love was such an easy game to play. Now I need a place to hide away—”_

“Timely!”

It’s only two-thirty, but Howard already has a drink in his hand and from the looks of things, at least one in his stomach. He tilts his head toward the radio. “You know they broke up, right?”

“I’m aware,” she says, half-amused. 

“You see this?” Howard brandishes the front page. “‘Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares.’ It’s like they want a mistrial.”

“Did he really say that?” Peggy asks mildly. “You’d think he’d know better.”

Howard points his glass at her accusingly. “You know you’re the only person in the office who isn’t following this case, right? Aren’t we supposed to be in intelligence?”

“Murderous hippies are rather outside our jurisdiction,” she informs him dryly. “And I find your fascination with that dreadful case positively ghoulish.” 

“See, now, that’s where you’re wrong,” he counters, setting his glass down on her desk. “Hippies, murderous _and_ otherwise, are _exactly_ our jurisdiction.”

“Do enlighten me.”

“There’s a great, big, I-told-you-so in your future, Director,” he says, cocking an eye mysteriously. “I wanted to give you the heads-up—one of our section chiefs is coming in to speak to you.”

“Oh? What about, the White Album?” 

Howard smirks. “I don’t want to break the suspense, but he should be in at three-ish. I like this one, Peggy, so hear him out.” He hands her the folder under his arm.

Also—” he glances at his watch, “Wanted to tell you I’m getting out of here early today, we’ve got a doctor’s appointment and at this rate I’ll have to make Jarvis blow all the red lights. He hates that.”

“Tell Maria good luck for me.” She’s secretly relieved that Jarvis will be driving him. Howard’s drinking seems to have worsened sharply after Maria had announced that she was pregnant. 

_“Suddenly – I’m not half the man I used to be. There’s a shadow hanging over me…”_

She pours herself a drink while she waits, flipping idly through the personnel file. Howard drinks because he likes the taste and needs to quiet his own internal doubts, but the decanter of whiskey she’s taken to keeping on her desk is solely for affect. 

She’d prefer it if everyone who walks through her office door were a known entity. In the earliest days, all of her field agents had either been personally vetted by her, or else approved by people she’d hand-picked for the job. As SHIELD has grown both in influence and size, such a thing has become impossible. It’s not that she doesn’t trust her own personnel, exactly, but paranoia is part and parcel to her job. 

The whiskey allows her room to observe. She can direct the pace of conversation as necessary—stopping to take a drink or fill a glass allows her a short pause to gather her thoughts, or to create seemingly organic silences. It’s an old lawyer’s trick, silence—people are almost always uncomfortable with it, and they try to fill it with noise. Consequently, they often end up saying much more than they’d ever meant to.

Howard’s section chief arrives at exactly three o’clock and raps smartly on the doorframe.

She looks up and beckons him in, turning off the radio and hiding the jolt of shock she feels.

He’s broad-shouldered and square-jawed, and he looks so much like Steve that for a second she almost thinks it’s actually him, clean-shaven for the first time in years. His hair is a bit longer and lighter than Steve’s, but otherwise, the resemblance is somewhat unnerving.

“Alexander Pierce,” he says, holding out his hand. “It’s an honor to meet you, Director McCauley.”

She smiles at the honorific. 

“Agent Pierce,” she says, shaking his hand, “I’m afraid Howard was rather enigmatic about the details of your visit. Do sit down.”

He grins a little, and sits. “Alex, please. I think Howard just likes being dramatic.”

“Spot-on,” she agrees dryly, returning his smile. “So, tell me about yourself, Alex. I like to get to know my agents. You were in Vietnam?”

He shifts in the chair. 

“Three tours.”

“Special Forces?”

“Project Delta.” 

She purses her lips. “Psy-ops?”

“Some.”

“So then, how did you come to be at SHIELD? As far as I’m aware, the war is still going on and Project Delta is still effective.”

“I was recruited after receiving an honorable discharge.” His eyes flick down to the personnel file on her desk and then back up to hers. His pose is relaxed.

She leans back in her chair. “And received a silver star for your troubles.”

He doesn’t respond but smiles slightly, his face otherwise inscrutable. 

“Alright, Alex,” she says finally, “Let’s get down to it. What have you got for me?”

“I’ve received reliable intel that Hoover’s counter-intelligence program has been infiltrating certain political activist groups for the purposes of surveillance and disruption,” Pierce says easily, his gaze unblinking. 

She leans back in her chair. She should have guessed, with Howard going on about hippies.

“Yes, I know,” she says calmly. “COINTELPRO. Originally, its purpose was to neutralize CPUSA, but it’s expanded rather beyond that.”

“So why isn’t SHIELD doing anything about it?”

Peggy studies him. He’s young, and clearly ambitious, so she’s not overly surprised that he’s pushing this particular matter. “Well, for one thing, we don’t have any verifiable sources or documentation. No-one who will confirm its existence, at least not on record.”

“This is a government agency committing domestic espionage against American citizens,” Pierce says lightly. The intensity of his gaze belies his studied nonchalance. “Aside from numerous acts of sabotage, I also have reason to believe that they’re behind at least a dozen instances of the discreditation and false imprisonment of prominent political leaders.”

“I don’t like it any more than you do,” Peggy replies. “But we have only what we’ve gathered from our informants, which isn’t much. The scope of the program is relatively small, at least within the bureau. Anyone involved with it is undoubtedly a hard-liner and will not give up information easily. Unless you’ve managed to procure something incontestable?”

“Not yet.”

She takes a small sip, watching him closely. His hands are open and relaxed, but she sees a muscle tic in his jaw.

“More importantly,” she continues, “SHIELD does operate under the oversight of the federal government, which at the moment is fighting a war to stop the spread of communism. If we are instrumental in exposing the FBI in this particular matter, we will undoubtedly be suspected to be communist sympathizers as well, which will destroy our credibility, at best.”

Pierce leans forward. “The scope of the program is well beyond monitoring supposed communist activities,” he says deliberately, his eyes locked on hers. “The Black Panther Party, student anti-war groups—hell, even the National Lawyers Guild have all been targeted.”

Peggy thumbs the rim of her glass and waits.

His eyes narrow, just the smallest amount. “Wasn’t SHIELD founded to protect people?”

She lets her friendly expression slip a bit. “By all means, don’t be coy, agent.”

“I just meant that I’m surprised at our—level of inaction here.”

She shrugs. “I’ve told you our limitations, Alex. What are you proposing?”

He sits back. “My section has a small number of agents stationed in prominent activist groups at this time,” he says, his voice deliberately casual. “Mostly posing as student dissidents. Purely for counter-intelligence-purposes, of course.”

“I see.” She studies him, wondering whether he’d done it before or after learning of COINTELPRO. “And who authorized that?”

“I did,” he answers evenly. He betrays no hint of nerves.

She gazes at him as she idly tilts her glass back and forth. He does remind her of Steve, but he’s making a fair show of professional detachment where Steve would have been brimming over with righteous indignation. Pierce seems sincere enough, but there’s always the lurking possibility that this is just inter-departmental rivalry, which had reached a boiling point in 1968 as the various intelligence agencies had jockeyed for supremacy. Tensions have calmed somewhat since then, but there’s still a difference between spy games and direct antagonism. Not for the first time, she wishes that she could have hand-picked all of her agents, so that she could be absolutely sure of each one’s agenda. 

When she doesn’t answer, Pierce continues. “Theoretically, we would be able to mobilize these groups to expose Hoover without exposing SHIELD.” 

He licks his lips, his voice turning eager. “The groups we’ve infiltrated are hardliners themselves. We’ve managed to turn them away from certain—activities which would likely be considered acts of terrorism, but what if we could direct their activities, so that we could get exactly what we need?”

“Go on.”

“If we could use one of these groups to stage a break-in, we could capture whatever documents we need in order to prove the existence of the program and disseminate it to the media. It would look solely like the work of activist groups. Amateurish but ultimately effective. SHIELD would never be involved.” 

She raises a brow, disappointed. She’d wanted to be persuaded. “You think you’re going to _break in_ to McNamara? Using civilians, no less? Agent,” she says, barking a laugh, “Even if you were somehow able to do so undetected, do you really think you’d ever be able to find the documents you need?

“No,” Pierce answers calmly. “Originally, we’d considered Philadelphia headquarters, but security is too tight there, as well. There’s a small satellite office in Media, Pennsylvania. It was flagged months ago as a drop-zone for at least two confirmed COINTELPRO agents.”

She turns it over in her mind. It’s not a bad idea, but—“How do you know that the office will have the documents you need?”

“I don’t,” he admits. “But it’s the best chance we’ve got.”

She stares at him for a moment, and then she leans forward and pushes the decanter toward him shortly. “Have a drink,” she orders.

He looks startled, but he obligingly fills a glass. “It’s not a bad idea,” she admits, once he’s had a sip, “But you must know that it won’t work.”

“We’ll have an agent onsite with them, and—”

She shakes her head, cutting him off. “The break-in could go off without a hitch and you could recover all the documents you’d ever want or need, and it still wouldn’t work. Do you know why?”

She sees his jaw clench, but his voice is light enough when he admits, “No.”

“If you give that information to the press—any legitimate press—they’ll turn around and hand it right back to the bureau,” she tells him. “They’ll never print it, and they won’t want their hands on it, either.” She smiles thinly. “It would be considered un-American.”

They regard each other for a long moment. Far off in the distance, she hears the sound of a car backfire. 

“With all due respect, Director,” Pierce says finally, “That’s a risk I’m willing to take.” 

She leans back in her chair. “Alright,” she agrees mildly, and he blinks. “I don’t want to see a briefing on it, although I would suggest staging the burglary during a live televised event. Boxing, maybe. Small towns keep odd hours.”

There’s a short pause in which Pierce seems to struggle with what to say, looking uncertain for the first time since walking into her office. In the end, he simply nods. “Thank you.”

“Howard will be thrilled if you pull this off,” she adds wryly. “You know he and Hoover quite hate each-other. He’d love nothing more than to see him undermined.”

Pierce smiles, and stands. He holds out his hand. “I appreciate your support, Director,” he says, his voice formal.

She takes his hand but holds it for a moment, letting her face harden. “You must understand that you are assuming all risk in this venture. Your operation is not sanctioned by SHIELD, and this conversation has never taken place. If any of your activities are traced back to SHIELD, we will deny that we ever authorized anything of the kind and disavow you as an agent.”

There’s a beat of silence. 

His expression does not waver. Without breaking eye contact, he raises his glass and drains the rest of it in one long swallow. “I understand.”

She watches him go, and then considers the contents of her own glass. Since learning of it, she and Howard had discussed COINTELPRO several times. Despite their mutual disgust, there really hadn’t even been a question as to whether they’d take action against Hoover—the risk far outweighs the benefits. It’s been hard enough working side-by-side with the CIA, undercutting each-other at every turn, without simultaneously declaring war on the FBI. Just another in a number of increasingly political decisions they’ve had to make lately.

What Pierce does not seem to know—and what she doesn’t need to tell him—is that the CIA is running its own domestic espionage project parallel to COINTELPRO. Unlike the FBI, however, the CIA has been smart enough to simultaneously infiltrate the media. They’d never be able to prove it, but by SHIELD’s estimation, the CIA likely has two-hundred plus assets—both plants and informants—stationed at various America media outlets. 

Even if any newspaper possessed the courage to publish such an incendiary story, she’s confident that the CIA won’t let it see the light of day. 

So why had she let him do it? He does seem like a good agent, and she can’t afford to lose competent personnel, especially these days. Maybe against all odds he’ll be successful at his mission, and inadvertently alleviate some of the guilt she feels whenever the news airs another protest turned violent.

She drains the glass.

1971 – ( _t_ )5

“Hey, can you hold that?”

Steve obligingly holds the elevator as Don Harris hurries in, shooting him a quick smile.

“Thanks. Can’t wait for this week to be over with.” 

Don’s been at HLM almost as long as Steve has, and they still lunch together occasionally. 

“Any good weekend plans?” Steve asks. For his part, he’s planning on treating Peggy to a nice dinner out at The Colony, but otherwise doesn’t quite know how he’ll fill the time. There’s only so much yard work he can do. Don’s somewhat reserved about his private life, but Steve’s fairly sure he’s unmarried.

“Well, actually,” Don says, “I do volunteer work every other Saturday. Not fun, maybe, but certainly a good way to spend the day.”

“Oh?” Steve isn’t remotely surprised—Don is unfailingly kind to his coworkers and support staff alike. “I always mean to volunteer more, but I don’t have any idea where to start. Where at, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Don looks at him thoughtfully, and then answers, “At the VA, down by Gramercy. You served, right?”

Even after all this time Steve still feels an initial flash of panic. “Yeah. Army.”

It’s been almost thirty years since Captain America went down in the _Valkyrie_. Steve’s long since grown back his beard, and his hair has naturally darkened since his twenties. He’s become practiced at playing Clark Kent in the workplace, and he’s always worn clothes just a little too big, to hide his form. Miraculously, nobody’s ever even mentioned that he bears a passing resemblance to Captain America. 

Still, he’s not sure he’ll ever truly relax about it until Steve Rogers emerges from the ice forty-odd years from now.

“Well, we could always use another hand,” Don offers. “There’s always something to help out with, especially these days. If you give them my name they’ll set you right up.”

“I appreciate that,” Steve tells him, smiling.

* * *

Over two weeks later, he still can’t bring himself to go. 

It helps that the Vietnam War hadn’t been widely glorified in the U.S. the way that World War II was, for obvious reasons. Steve himself knows only the barest details, so he gets to experience it all in real time. While that’s easier on his personal life, it makes it harder for Steve to ignore the creeping sense of restlessness he feels every time the casualty reports come in; harder still to watch the footage that airs constantly, of burned-out villages and hard-bitten young men who seem so much colder than Steve’s former compatriots. 

During the War, Steve had had the luxury of never questioning the righteousness of his cause, never wondering whether he should be fighting. Fighting HYDRA was a noble pursuit, and they’d been hailed as heroes everywhere they went. Now, the young boys returning home are treated with derision, at best—even worse are the laughably inadequate benefits they receive. He’d been deeply affected by the silent march he’d seen footage of earlier in the year—a grim parade of veteran casualties, many of them in wheelchairs, passing mutely along Pennsylvania Avenue. Each unbearably young face had been suffused with an identical hollow cast.

Today, he’d finally gotten past the front door of the clinic when he’d stopped short, feeling a sudden horrible lurch in his gut as he caught sight of his own visage. The faded Captain America poster on the wall is almost as iconic as the pointing Uncle Sam, by now; Steve has seen it a hundred times. It’s his old propaganda poster, from his USO days: _Cap Salutes You! For Buying War Bonds._

It’s supposed to be ironic, or so he’s been told. Warhol had even made it into a Technicolor diptych, back in the sixties. Everything about it makes him cringe—the cheesy outfit and helmet with the jaunty wings, and that crooked two fingered salute. Seeing it now fills him with something that almost feels like disgust. For just a moment he’s back in Italy, prancing around in his tights like a show-pony in front of a cadre of cynical, battle-hardened men. 

They’d probably put it up as a passably-patriotic gag, something to lighten the mood a little. He’s faintly surprised that it hasn’t been defaced. If he’d never crashed the _Valkyrie_ , what would his role be like now? If not sent overseas to join the fight, would he be touring around the country again as America’s favorite mascot, encouraging the public to Support the War Effort?

He turns away from the image of the star-spangled man with a plan and resolves to sign up for a soup kitchen or something, making a mental note to give his excuses to Don. He’s done his part—he’s saved America—the world—several times over. It’s okay to be just Steve McCauley, architect.

Even Captain America deserves to rest.

* * *

Later in the evening, he hears the telltale fumbling at the door and then the familiar trill of “Steve, darling?” that still never fails to warm him. He turns off the TV, quickly, and stands up to greet her. Although she’s past fifty, she’s still straight-backed and sure-footed in her sensible black heels. The smile she gives him is wan but loving as he puts his arms around her. 

“Hard day?” he asks quietly as she rests her head on his chest. 

She laughs a little. “You could say that,” she says wearily. “And I’ve just found that I’ll have to leave for Detroit tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow?” 

She nods, pulling away and giving him a quick kiss on the lips. “Unfortunately. So I hope you’ve cooked up something lovely for me tonight.”

One of the only things that the future had afforded him was a lot of time on his own (especially after he’d dismantled SHIELD, something that twinges in the back of his mind whenever Peggy chatters excitedly about the progress she’s making). He’d mostly taken up cooking to fill the empty hours, but all of his meals had been enjoyed alone, rendering his culinary accomplishments empty. Maybe it’s a silly affectation, but he feels a small thrill of victory every time Peggy compliments him on this small thing.

“So, what’s in Detroit?” Steve asks as he carefully dishes the chicken tikka masala onto Peggy’s plate. 

She sighs and shakes her head. “It’s a media event, promising to be absolutely ghastly. A publication of the war crimes in Vietnam. Goodness knows we can’t afford another My Lai, but I’m not sure this is the way to go about stopping that.”

Steve hums sympathetically. “Why do you have to be there?” In truth, he’s always interested in events that he hadn’t managed to catch up on. He prefers to experience history along with Peggy, even when that history isn’t palatable.

“Oh, well, damage control, mostly. We don’t want them airing out state secrets, particularly concerning SHIELD.” She laughs a little. “You know the press, always more concerned about dramatics than national security. They’re actually calling it the _Winter Soldier Investigation_ , can you imagine?”

Steve nearly drops his plate. His reality yaws, tilting him dangerously off-center. 

“The _what_?”

He can't stop the inadvertent sharpness of his tone. Why hadn’t he heard about this before?

“‘Winter Soldier Investigation.’ You know, like ‘the summer soldier and the sunshine’—what’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” he says, knowing that she won’t be fooled.

She looks at him doubtfully. “You know about this?”

He fights for equilibrium.

“I hadn’t heard of that investigation before now, Pegs. I swear.”

She purses her lips. 

Steve can see from the set of her face that she doesn’t really believe him, but she doesn’t push him, either, and that’s a relief. He has no idea what he’ll say, if she ever does.

They eat dinner, and they talk of other things, but the conversation is stilted. More than once, he catches her looking closely at him, as though his face might give something away.

He spends most of the night lying awake, various scenarios running through his mind. Of course the Winter Soldier moniker would have had to have come from somewhere, but he hadn’t expected _this_. 

Of course, he never does.

He can no longer ignore the abrupt reminders of Bucky that materialize at increasing intervals, his unseen presence rising like a discordant leitmotif to subtly disrupt the harmony of Steve’s life. At first, it was only little things—the Brooklyn Dodgers, or seeing Daisy Maisie again—but now Bucky is making himself known with increasing insistence, as though determined that Steve not forget him, the way he’s tried so hard to suppress everything else. 

Sometimes, he thinks that Bucky is— _with him to the end of the_ —like his shadow, following him through the ages no matter where he is. 

Steve can keep his face turned toward the sunshine, but the— _end of the line, pal_ —shadow always lurks behind.

1972 – ( _t_ )5

Having a preternaturally handsome and young-looking husband tends to make one feel simultaneously self-conscious and smug. She can’t deny a certain self-satisfaction when she sees the wide-eyed looks that women still send Steve, but she’s fifty-three now, positively middle-aged, and although she’d always thought it a silly affectation it’s become downright necessary to dye her hair back to its former chestnut, lest she look like his elder aunt.

Steve seems enjoying himself tonight, for once—Stark Industries is always hosting a gala or charitable fundraiser of some kind, and although Steve dutifully accompanies her whenever she asks, she knows he’s happiest at home in old flannels with a paintbrush in hand.

She hopes that it’s a sign he’s shaken off the doldrums that seem to have overtaken him lately. She thinks that maybe he, too, is feeling his age, even if he doesn’t show it, since he’s taken to reminiscing more about his childhood. Though she doesn’t particularly enjoy his Dickensian tales of growing up in the Great Depression, what with his tendency to lionize Barnes, practically a saint in Steve’s sepia-toned memory, she vastly prefers it to his brooding over the Future.

Logically, they both know that just being back must have already changed things, to some extent, but he’s still as tight-lipped as ever. Steve wouldn’t even tell her if she remained unmarried in his future, or if she’d married someone else (although she thinks that she must have, since he looks so guilty about it all). Part of her can’t help but wonder whom her Mystery Date had been and if she had been happy, with him. If she knows him now. It’s a strange and disconcerting feeling, to shake the hand of an acquaintance, to feel a fleeting, guilty spark of attraction, and to wonder—in another life, was this man my husband? 

Across the room, Daniel Sousa, her longtime coworker at SHIELD, smiles at her over his drink, and then immediately flushes and then looks away. He’s held a small torch for her for years, she knows, but it doesn’t embarrass her as it should—instead, she thinks about his shy smile and his kind eyes and tries to imagine what another Peggy might have done, in another life without Captain America.

The one thing Steve assures her of is that, to his knowledge, she was never involved with Howard Stark, and that’s a relief. Of course he’s made a drunken pass or two at her, but that’s only because she’s a woman within striking distance—Howard respects her too much to make a serious proposition, and despite the recent coolness between them, he’d never betray Steve in such a way. Unfortunately, his respect doesn’t extend to Maria, who ignores his affairs and, if the rumors are correct, has finally embarked on one of her own.

Peggy’s hardly one to question someone’s parenting, but she can’t help but wonder about the affect this will all have on their son one day. Steve, of course, disapproves whole-heartedly, but then, Steve can’t know of exactly how or why Howard is so troubled, especially lately. A week after Zola’s terminal diagnosis, Howard had abruptly ordered select portions of his work destroyed. 

She can’t say that she blames him.

Pushing away her creeping thoughts, she searches for Steve amongst the crowd. She finds him standing alone near the bar, staring fixedly across the room. The casual observer might think that someone’s merely caught his eye, but she recognizes that telltale clench of this jaw.

Automatically, she follows his gaze but is unable to figure out exactly what he’s looking at, especially given the dense crowd. She sees Maria leaning in furtively towards a General’s wife; next to them, a small cluster of what Peggy knows to be fairly high-ranking SHIELD employees are laughing rather loudly. Judging by his extravagant hand gestures, Samuel Travis is in the middle of regaling Alex Pierce and Melinda Cartwright with some ridiculous stories. Tonight, Melinda has appeared with flaming red hair—one of Peggy’s best field agents, she vacillates between accentuating and downplaying her vulpine beauty. Peggy really can’t blame Steve if his gaze had been drawn to Melinda—not least, a traitorous voice reminds her, because she’d been considering the matrimonial qualities of her own coworkers, just now.

She loses herself in troubled thoughts for a moment, and is startled by a hand at her elbow. It’s Steve of course, turning her gently so that she’s facing him.

His smile is so artlessly sweet that she feels a sharp stab of guilt. “Here,” he says, and presses the glass into her hand. 

She’d forgotten that she’d asked for it in the first place. 

Still slightly off-balance, she takes it and flashes a smile. “Are you ready to abscond?” she asks.

He places a soft kiss to her temple. “Let’s do it.”

There’s no need to fight through the crowd to make their goodbyes, and they’re able to slip out relatively unnoticed. Just before they leave the floor, she sees him glance back, once. 

Two months later, when she catches a flustered Melinda exiting Howard’s office at a suspiciously late hour, smoothing down her hair and tugging at her dress, she feels an almost instinctual surge of anger towards Steve, as though she were the one betrayed. It’s not fair, and she knows it--would he really have known about this small thing, out of Howard's many affairs? She feels it all the same.

1973 – ( _t_ )5

"Well, my darling," Peggy says brightly, "You're about to be memorialized!"

"I'm what?" Steve asks, looking up from the paper.

Peggy beams. "They're beginning construction on a lovely new statute of you that's going to be placed in Central Park. They considered putting it in Arlington, but in the end they were convinced that you needed to be home in New York." She winks at him. "It's going to be adjacent to the 107th memorial from World War I—fitting, don't you think?"

Peggy’s demeanor has been aggressively cheerful, lately. For some time now, an unspoken tension has been building between them, and although neither of them have explicitly addressed it, Peggy seems determined to remedy the situation with relentless positivity. 

"Yeah," Steve says, trying to keep his own voice light. He's felt restless all day—this really couldn't have come at a worse time. Mostly, he's entirely content with his new life, but from time to time he still gets that itch under his skin. He'd forgotten that people don't really work out much, here. He’s not sure when running craze will hit big in America, so in an effort to keep a low profile he'd mostly stopped entirely. He can't really join a gym or boxing club without revealing his freakish strength, so these days he can really only work off energy doing construction and yard work. As much as he loves being an architect, spending nine hours a day huddled over blueprints and schematics has made him appreciate the former freedom he’d enjoyed to come and go as he’d pleased.

He feels the way he thinks a professional athlete must feel after being suddenly sidelined with an injury, and sometimes he misses those early morning forty-mile runs, or breaking down punching bags one at a time. Some days he thinks he'll end up as fat as Thor did.

More than that, though—sometimes he misses being Captain America. He misses the adrenaline pumping through his veins, the heady triumph that comes with victory, and the crackling excitement that had surrounded everything. To his dismay, he’s started to feel that old nagging sense of helplessness as he watches injustices pass him by, even with the knowledge that it'll all turn out right in the end. Bucky used to call him out on it—said his sense of justice grew a lot broader the more antsy he got.

_Sometimes I think you like getting punched._

The War had been brutal and cruel, and the Future bright and violent, but he can't deny that there were moments when he’d loved the fight.

Peggy mock-frowns at him. "I'd think you'd be a bit more excited to get your own statue! I'd settle for just a sidebar."

"No, it's—it's great," Steve tries to smile. "Just thinking about having to stay incognito for awhile."

Peggy's teasing expression softens. “Oh, Steve,” she says. “I wouldn’t worry too much, really. Howard says it’s just the government trying to drum up support for the war effort, and with the beard you look quite a bit different, these days.” She settles carefully onto his lap and leans her head against his. “You should probably steel yourself for vandalism, if anything.” 

Steve laughs weakly. 

Peggy lifts her head to look into his eyes, raising a hand to his cheek. "Except it's more than that, isn't it?" she asks, stroking his face gently. Her voice is kind. "It’s something else. Something that you can’t tell me.”

Steve shrugs. It's close enough to the truth, but he finds that he doesn't really want to talk to Peggy about this—he's not sure she'll quite understand, given how she feels about the Future. 

She asks the question she always asks him, when she senses him growing homesick for a time that hasn’t happened yet. “Does everything turn out alright, in the end?”

Does it? Steve thinks of Thor, fat and broken; of Clint, eyes hard and hands stained with blood. Of Tony, burned up from the inside out. Of Natasha, dead on a lonely alien planet somewhere, her soul forever trapped in a Stone.

He thinks of Bucky, wild-eyed and confused, fist raised to kill and horror dawning on his face. Bucky, battered and frozen in a cryogenic tube. Bucky, crumbling into dust before his eyes. 

“Yeah,” he answers finally. “Everything turns out alright.”

She kisses his temple. “Then leave those worries to your younger self. Your war’s over, Steve.”

_The Man Out of Time. Thinking you can live without a war._

_The War’s over, Steve! We can go home!_

He wills the memory— _nightmare?_ —away, and tries to remember that that Future is not _his_ future, anymore. 

Later that night he lies awake, staring at the ceiling. He’s stopped hiding from himself that he’s not really in the past, but in a world of his own making that he’d deliberately brought into existence. Was it solely because in the end, he simply couldn’t cope with his own reality? Is this all so that he can play house and reject the truth of what actually happened to him, to Peggy, to the universe, until he’s too old to be dragged back into the fray? 

_It always ends in a fight._

Peggy gives him the rendering of the statue before she leaves for work the next morning. It’s Captain America standing alone, his iconic shield on his left arm and an American flag clutched in his right. 

_I can do this all day._

He tears the paper in two.

1975 – ( _t_ )5

It’s the thirtieth anniversary of Steve’s sacrifice, but it warrants barely a blip in the papers on the Fourth of July. That’s how Steve knows that Captain America fatigue has finally set in; he’s officially passé. The notion gives him less pleasure than he’d thought, but not because he’d relished being hero-worshipped. It’s just that he’d figured that the less he had to hear about _Captain America_ , the less his past—and future—would continue to plague his thoughts the way they’ve been these past few years. 

Peggy is somewhere in Europe on official SHIELD business, and he’s glad, because he doesn’t want any company tonight. Steve turned down a few invitations to certain holiday barbecues in favor of sitting on top of an apartment building in Manhattan and watching the fireworks over the East River. It’s something he used to do, long ago—except that he'd been on the other side, watching Manhattan, then.

It had been surprisingly strenuous, climbing up the endless fire escapes. He’s not sure if he can attribute it more to the serum finally wearing down or to the fact that it’s now been well over thirty years since he’s really hit the gym, let alone scaled a building. He’s on his second bottle of gin and he thinks that he might finally be feeling some kind of side effect other than distaste. Maybe in a few years, he’ll be able to actually get drunk. He doesn’t like gin much at all, but Bucky had loved it, and it was Bucky who used to drag him up onto the highest rooftop Steve’s weak body could get to, so that Steve could see the fireworks. Bucky used to tell him that the fireworks were for Steve’s birthday, and though Steve had always rolled his eyes, secretly the excitement in Bucky’s voice had made him almost believe it. 

Every year, Bucky had managed to somehow scrounge up some sort of treat for Steve’s birthday. Usually it was nothing much more extravagant than an orange, but the year Steve turned sixteen, Bucky somehow got ahold of a buttercream cupcake. It was so rich and meticulously decorated that Steve had known that Bucky must have nicked it, but Bucky had looked so self-consciously proud when he’d presented it that Steve just couldn’t bring himself to care. 

As they got older, Bucky had taken to bringing up a flask of gin as well. Steve had immediately hated the taste, but every year Bucky still somehow managed to persuade Steve to drink far too much. No matter what happened during the day, for over a decade, Steve spent every night of his birthday with Bucky, staring up at the rockets’ red glare.

He hasn’t shared those memories with Peggy. Although she’d never be unkind enough to actually breathe a word against him, her face takes on an arch, slightly patronizing expression whenever he appears in Steve’s childhood tales. 

She just can’t get over that bad first impression of Bucky, and sometimes, Steve doesn’t think that she wants to. He knows that she regards Bucky as just one of Fagin’s boys thrown together with Steve out of circumstance. There’s really no way to convince her that Bucky was no Artful Dodger but a scrappy hero straight from the pages of Horatio Alger who’d kept Steve alive through sheer determination at times, seeing them both through the Great Depression on little more than grit and spit-shine. 

Steve can’t make her understand that back then, Steve hadn’t much to offer but untapped potential at a time when your contribution didn’t just matter but was vital. Bucky had dropped out of school early to take back-breaking jobs down at the docks even though he’d been a better student than Steve, and he’d never begrudged Steve the extra shifts he’d taken to pay for the both of them. 

Steve can’t convey to her what Bucky’s friendship—freely given to Steve, at a dear cost without expectation of reciprocation—had meant to him.

Steve thinks that sometimes, he resents her just the smallest bit for that.

It’s been difficult lately, now that the Cold War is perpetual headlining news, not to dwell on thoughts of Bucky. Especially after that _Winter Soldier_ bombshell, even if its apparently got nothing to do with him. Bucky had been particularly active in the Eastern Bloc around this time, and lately Steve catches himself wondering where Bucky is and what he’s doing—if he’s out destabilizing countries or undergoing torture or just waiting for his next mission, half-dead and frozen.

Sometimes, Steve thinks maybe the reason he’s felt so bitter lately is because he knows that even if he possessed the resolve to try, he wouldn’t be able to save Bucky now. Sure, he’d made the decision long ago not to change anything, but the harsh consequence of that choice has proven surprisingly painful.

Even if he spills the whole sorry secret to Peggy, what can SHIELD do about it? They’re infested with HYDRA by now, anyway, and he worries that warning Peggy at this point could prove fatal to her (to say nothing of the long-term consequences). Steve has missed his window to save both SHIELD and his friend. Bucky has forty years left to pay. 

The slowly waning serum is something of an expiry in another way, as well; a door that had always stayed stubbornly ajar is closing. Under Steve’s bed is a small metal lockbox, and hidden beneath layers of clothes in his top dresser drawer is a tiny metal key. Inside the lockbox is a metal wristband that can take Steve right back to the Future whenever he wants. Steve would never dream of leaving Peggy, but the failsafe had always been available.

He thinks of appearing on that podium in front of them now, and feels ashamed. Will they be able to tell how he’s aged and grown soft? 

Will Bucky begrudge him the fact that Steve was content to allow him to suffer for another seventy years?

He can’t bring himself to find out. 

He takes another sip of gin and stares out at Brooklyn. Sometimes he feels as though he’d only dreamt that most distant part of his life. His once-pristine memory has somewhat faded, turning his early years into an amalgamation of hurts and hungers; small moments of heartache and happiness that he can’t decide if he wants to forget or turn over and over in his mind, trying to relive them. 

Sarah smiling and stroking his face, her own a gentle blur surrounded by a golden halo of blonde curls.

Sarah, pale and coughing, her blood obscenely bright against her white lips.

His first date with Betty Thomas, awkward and gangly and a head taller than he’d been.

The shouts of the newsboys on December 7, 1941.

David Blake breaking his nose.

The stinging smell of incense as he knelt on the hard, cold floor of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. 

Bucky lifting him to his feet, his smile kind and his knuckles bloodied in Steve’s defense.

Bucky, smoking on the fire escape, his grin quick and his dark curls loose over his forehead.

Bucky kneeling at his sickbed, his young face grimly determined. 

Bucky. 

Bucky. 

_Bucky._

Steve stares out over the East River and thinks about a home that he can never return to, no matter what. 

The metal wristband tempts him. What if he uses it, just for an hour, to go back even further? He’s sure it can do that. He doesn’t have to chase memories—he can actually go back and visit them. Just to catch a quick glimpse. No-one will recognize him—no-one ever need know.

Y _our pal, your buddy, your_ Bucky.

He should destroy the wristband, and leave the shield to rot.

He should never go back.

Chasing oblivion, he finishes the bottle but only succeeds in giving himself a mild stomachache. 

He returns home and stares at the TV until it shows him only black-and-white static. 

In the morning, when he wakes up on the couch, his breath foul and his discontent lingering, he marches upstairs and grabs his most recent sketchbook. He rips out the pages and then he takes them back downstairs and burns them into ash, and then he waits for his wife to return home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is...the slowest of slow burns, huh. I promise I've got it all mapped out. Also, we're gonna burn through the 80's pretty quickly.
> 
> Comments are greatly appreciated! :)
> 
> Lyrics from The Beatles "Yesterday".
> 
> Historical Footnotes!
> 
> Nixon's opinion of Manson's guilt ran on the front page of the LA Times, and Manson tried to use it to prejudice the jury.
> 
> COINTELPRO was real, and completely fucking bonkers, to say the very least. It started out as the FBI trying to disrupt the Communist Party USA, and then expanded to the illegal surveillance and infiltration of just about every political group out there. The CIA was running a similar program at the same time called Operation CHAOS (bit on the nose if you ask me). They probably had a hand in a few assassinations. Pretty horrible stuff. 
> 
> In 1971, an activist group broke into an FBI satellite office in Media, PA, and stole documents related to COINTELPRO. They sent it anonymously to various media outlets, who mostly refused to publish anything (with the exception of the Washington Post). The drop-zone thing is made up, though.
> 
> ETA: One big feature of COINTELPRO was that they kept a big list of "potentially disruptive" citizens (i.e. political activists like MLK) that were scheduled to be rounded up and "preemptively detained" in the event of a national emergency. Very much a real-life Project Insight kind of deal.
> 
> The Winter Soldier Investigation was a media event intended to publicize war crimes and prove that incidents like My Lai were not isolated.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This thing has become kind of a behemoth, but we’re almost in the home stretch -- if you're still reading, thanks for sticking with me! This has been really fun. Comments are appreciated!
> 
> Let’s all go to the Movies!

1977 – ( _t_ )5

Steve has already seen _Star Wars_ , of course, but it’s incredibly fun to experience it for the first time all over again. He’s now seen it no less than five times in theaters, each time packed full to the brim. He’s secretly delighted at how the dated special effects can astonish audiences; he loves hearing their collective gasps and screams of delight. In the Future, theaters will be playing twenty movies at a go with CGI that far outstrips anything now onscreen, and the audience will be playing with their phones. 

One of the things he’d noticed in the Future was how people had become so used to being passive spectators of readily-available entertainment that they rarely reacted much at all, to anything. Once, in a fit of nostalgia, he’d attended a local Spring Fair outside of the city, and in between the cheap tilt-a-whirls and junk food vendors was a real live magic show that ran for fifteen minutes every hour. It was honestly impressive stuff—a throw-back to the kind of old-timey slight-of-hand and fire-swallowing that Steve remembered from his childhood, but each magic trick was met with only a smattering of polite applause. He remembered the small shiver he’d felt when he looked at the blank faces of the watching children, too used to one-sided interaction to understand that they should react.

Not to mention the fact that in the future, each massive leap forward in technical spectacle is taken in stride and passé within months, leaving no room for wonder. _Star Wars_ may signal a shift in entertainment that Steve doesn’t really like much, but for now he’s content to savor the wide-eyed wonder of dazzled children and adults alike. 

He’d convinced Peggy that she really had to see this one, even hinted at its lasting cultural importance, so she’d gamely obliged him. She’d seemed entertained enough, but though she’d never try to dampen his enthusiasm, he could tell that she hadn’t really _gotten it_. 

He’d seen it for the second time with John Fitzsimmons, and John had been so enthralled that he’d insisted they go again, the very next week. Steve’s seen it twice more since then, and even though the film’s been out since May, the crowds keep coming.

He strolls out of the theater and into the bright August sun, smiling at the excited chatter around him. It’s a Saturday, and Peggy’s been stuck in DC for over a week or so. She’s been fairly vague about it—more hearings on Vietnam war crimes, he thinks—but he doesn’t mind. She won’t be home until Monday at the earliest, so he’d decided to forego his daily chores. 

He stops by a hot dog cart and buys two, with all the trimmings—even though he’s mentally tallying new, minute signs of aging each day, his metabolism seems to run just as hot as it did twenty years ago. He can tell that it’s driving Peggy crazy—even though she seems as trim as ever to him, she keeps talking about how she’ll have to sign up for Weight Watchers one of these days. He can’t tell if she’s kidding or not.

He buys a newspaper and tucks it under his arm as he strolls down the sidewalk towards the park. He doesn’t realize that he’s actually been smiling the entire time, until he unfolds the newspaper and scans the headlines. Nothing much good to report, here—a few fear-mongering stories on the USSR conducting an underground nuclear test, and a follow-up on the Johnstown flash flood. 

A story on page sixteen catches his eye, and at first he thinks he must be reading it wrong. “Mind-Control Studies Had Origins in Trial of Mindszenty”. 

“ _Mind-Control Studies_ ”? 

The name _Mindszenty_ sounds vaguely familiar—something to do with communism, Steve thinks. He keeps reading.

“In the summer of 1977, it may be difficult for Americans to comprehend the frame of mind of the men who nearly 30 years earlier started the Central Intelligence Agency's effort to manipulate human behavior.” 

Steve’s blood turns to ice. A sick feeling of foreboding that he thinks has been lying dormant for some time blooms in his gut.

As far as he knows, the CIA was never involved with HYDRA, but—

“The original research was spurred by the conviction—later proved unfounded —that the Russians and Chinese had developed brainwashing and mind‐control devices. But the C.I.A. quickly turned to seeking an offensive use for behavior control.” 

_And when history did not cooperate, history was changed._

“One of their longest running goals was to develop a way to induce amnesia.”

_He remembered you. Until they put his brain back in a blender._

“They were interested in simple destruction, too. As with the other business that made amnesia so attractive, they wanted to be able to get away with murder without leaving a trace.”

_He’s a ghost. You’ll never find him._

“They sought to crack the mental defenses of enemy agents—to be able to program them and their own operatives to carry out any mission even against their will and ‘against such fundamental laws of nature as self‐preservation.’”

_What you did all those years—it wasn't you. You didn't have a choice._

_I know. But I did it._

It should be impossible to sit here in the heat of the cheerfully blazing sun and the happy laughter of passersby echoing around him while he reads the words on the page. It’s all there, in black and white. Right there in the New York Fucking Times. 

He flips back through the paper, the pages slapping the air, and he rapidly scans the headlines but he doesn’t see anything else about the CIA. He also doesn’t remember ever hearing about this—not in the future, and not in the last—what, twenty years? The article is buried on page sixteen—it’s not even headline news. 

He stares at the page until the words swim together, trying to get ahold of himself. Logically—rationally—he _knows_ that this must have already happened. There would be no Winter Soldier if it hadn’t. But—

That was HYDRA. Or Russia, even. Not the _CIA_. 

He folds the paper with studied calm despite the trembling in his hands, tucking it underneath his armpit. There is a splinter in his mind, worrying at him, and he tries to bury it deeper as he leaves the park, resolute. This has already happened and there’s nothing that he can do about it. Peggy will be home tomorrow, and he’s got to go home and clean out the gutters, like he’s been promising to do for the past three weeks. He’ll stop by the grocers on his way home and—

Steve abruptly turns on his heel and heads west, toward Midtown. He’s visited the library only infrequently, but he knows where the microfiche is. 

He leaves two hours later with another bundle of papers clenched in his fist. He forces himself not to look until he’s safely inside his house.

What he finds is scant; only seventeen articles to cover an insidious program in effect for almost two decades. The story had first broken open in 1974, when the New York Times had published a bombshell article about alleged CIA domestic espionage activities. News about the mind control experiments, however, had only broken in July. 

The articles are somewhat vague and careful not to propose direct implications. There’s not a lot of detail, but there doesn’t need to be—he recognizes them well enough to fill in the blanks. 

Electric shock.

Reduction of the body temperature to below freezing.

Radiation.

Psychosurgery.

He remembers reading that little manila file Natasha had handed him, and being sick for the first time since 1943.

He spends hours re-reading the articles, not quite sure what he’s looking for. It’s entirely possible that the program is a coincidence—mind-control isn’t the sole province of HYDRA, after all, and the concept isn’t novel—the _Manchurian Candidate_ had been published in 1959, remarkably managing to predict much both the post-hypnotic trigger and unwilling assassin. There’s no mention of SHIELD or even the FBI in any of the articles. By all accounts, the program appears to have been a rogue CIA operation, so clandestine to have been unknown even by the latest director himself. 

And then—

There it is, in an article titled “Private Institutions Used in CIA Effort to Control Behavior”. 

“The agency's entry into the field of behavior control was widespread and on varying levels. For instance, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, chief of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of the Neuro‐Psychiatric Institute, was asked to make a study of LSD by Dr. Gottlieb.”

Dr. Louis Jolyon West. 

Steve knows him, but not from the future. He’d shaken West’s hand, at one of Stark’s events, and he’d laughed when West had corrected Stark’s introduction, telling Steve to call him “Jolly”. Steve remembers him because of the whimsical nickname, and because he’d briefly wondered what a University psychiatrist had been doing at an uncommonly exclusive Stark Industries party, which Steve had known to be merely a thin veneer for a SHIELD function.

He sits back, feeling lifeless. Empty. The heavy weight of terrible certainty threatens to crush him.

It had been in the news for years, and Peggy had never said a word. 

He calls Peggy three times at her hotel in DC, but he’s unable to reach her. He leaves a message for her at the front desk, but doubts that she’ll call him back. It’s likely that she’s busy, helping to prepare for what must be a harrowing Congressional hearing.

While he waits for her to return, he pivots rapidly between re-reading the articles and trying to force them out of his mind. Every so often, he rationalizes. The article paints West as only tangentially involved in MK-ULTRA, paid to do a study on LSD by the CIA. His presence doesn’t really implicate SHIELD in any way—he was likely just there one of Howard’s collection of oddities, personified indulgence in Howard’s passing fancy in neuro-psychiatry.

Steve calls in sick to work on Monday, already knowing that he won’t be able to concentrate. At two o’clock, he gives up entirely and starts drinking gin, welcoming the lash of bitter fire in his throat.

The serum is still strong enough that his head feels unhappily clear when he finally hears the familiar call from the front door.

“Steve, darling?” 

His stomach drops. He rubs his sweating palms against his slacks. He’s been waiting for an eternity, but it’s suddenly too soon.

Her heels click businesslike down the hallway. He turns, knowing that he must look an unshowered mess.

“Oh, no, Steve,” she says, her face blanching. “What’s happened?” She walks quickly towards him, and then stops short when he meets her gaze. 

His mouth dry, he holds out the newspaper clipping to her. 

Slowly, she takes it, her expression first confused and then resigned. 

She sighs shortly. “Yes, well. Dreadful, isn’t it? There’s no stopping the hearing, unfortunately, so I’ll be returning to Washington on Monday.”

“Did you know?” he whispers. 

She meets his gaze, her face impassive. To her credit, she doesn’t ask him what he means. “Yes,” she says coolly, and hands the newspaper back. She turns around and busies herself in the kitchen. “But surely you did, as well.”

He balls up his fists, feeling his throat close up. “Not about this.”

“Didn’t you?” She turns back to him abruptly, her expression hard. “I never know what it is that you _do_ know, Steve, but still I don’t question you. I’ll thank you to extend to me the same courtesy.”

“That’s different, and you know it. _Human experimentation_ , Peggy? Is that what SHIELD stands for now?”

Is that what _you_ stand for now, he doesn’t say. He remembers clutching that file and asking Natasha—who could do something like this?

“Well, that’s rich coming from you,” she fires back, her dark eyes flashing. “‘Human experimentation’ is how we created _Captain America_ in the first place.”

It feels like a punch in the gut.

“I _volunteered_!” 

She stands rigid for a moment as they stare at each other, and then abruptly sags against the kitchen counter, finally dropping her imperious carriage. The tired lines in her face look more pronounced than usual. “Things are never so black and white as you want to believe, Steve.”

She’s silent for a moment. “After Korea, we started seeing the effects in rescued American POWs. And then agents— _loyal agents_ —stationed overseas, were suddenly defecting to the Soviets without warning or reason. At first, it was just— research to understand what was happening, so that we could countermand the effects. They feared it could be a sort of—psychological Manhattan Project, and we had very good reason to.” She rubs her forehead with her hands. “And it wasn’t all… _mind-control_ , you know. Some of it was very similar to Project Rebirth, in fact.”

“Was SHIELD involved with—all of it?”

“Not at first, no. And then only indirectly.”

“How?”

“I don’t demand answers from _you_ , Steve,” Peggy counters sharply. “I shouldn’t even be telling you any of this.”

“I’m a goddamned time-traveler from the year 2023 and you think I can’t keep a state secret?”

“And I am your _wife_!” she bursts out, standing suddenly ramrod straight.

They glare at each other. Peggy is breathing hard, her curls loose and quivering about her face. “I am your wife and you’ve told me _nothing_ , for _years_ , Steve! You don’t even trust me with—”

She cuts herself off and turns away, her hands pressed against the counter. They’ve never spoken this harshly to each other, not in over thirty years, and it’s both devastating and relieving to finally lance the bloating boil. 

The relentless ticking of the grandfather clock in the hearth steadily lacerates the silence. 

When she speaks again, her voice is deliberately calm. “SHIELD’s R & D department far out-surpasses that of almost any other government agency. On a purely need-to-know basis, we provided the CIA some technological assistance and—oversight—to the project, although it was, in the end, a failure on all points. I was not personally involved.”

“Was Zola?” 

She does not look at him. 

“I don’t need to justify my actions to you, Steve.” Peggy says finally, turning to face him. She hesitates, and then adds, “But for what it’s worth—we—SHIELD—did not know the full extent of the program until it was already finished.”

He desperately wants to believe her. For the first time in his life, Steve looks at Peggy and feels regret. Her chin is lifted defensively—her greying curls frame her still-beautiful face. She’ll always be beautiful to him. 

It’s not that he regrets their life together, of course. He can’t. It’s just that he knows that he’ll never again be able to see Peggy Carter the way he’d always seen her in his memories; his True North. It’s not fair to her, maybe, that he should have kept her on a pedestal all these years; to never have acknowledged that she would have undoubtedly made compromises along the way. 

He’d known about Operation Paperclip, after all. He’s always known about Zola. 

He’d always known that her hands weren’t clean, even if he hadn’t quite let himself believe it.

He remembers sitting in the pew at her funeral, staring up at Peggy’s great-niece. 

_Compromise where you can. Where you can't, don't. Even if everyone is telling you that something wrong is something right._

Somehow, he’d gotten into his head that Peggy’s compromises would have all sat right with him. That all of her choices would have been correct. But then, he supposes that he has no leg to stand on, here. Not anymore.

He thinks about how he’d felt when he’d discovered that he’d unwittingly been a tool for HYDRA all along. 

_Your death amounts to the same as your life – a zero sum._

He hasn’t told Peggy that SHIELD—her life’s work—is, and has always been, corrupted. It had been infested with HYDRA from the very beginning, a “beautiful parasite” subverting the very thing that Peggy had sought to protect, and he’d sat back and let it happen. 

He thinks about sitting across the table from Howard and Maria Stark, watching them engage in a rare moment of sincere affection and knowing that he may not save them from their horrific fate.

He has no choice but to forgive her, and to put it out of his mind the best he can. They will never speak of it again. 

She leaves for Washington early. He takes the compass from his desk and puts it into the metal lockbox. 

It belongs there, now. 

1976 – ( _t_ )5

“I’m sorry, Sousa,” Howard announces, appearing suddenly next to them. “But I’m gonna have to borrow your boss for a second.”

“Sure thing, Howard.”

Sousa hands her over like a gentleman, and Peggy smiles warmly until he disappears into the crowd. She turns to Howard and lets her expression drop into exasperation. 

“Was that really necessary?”

“He dances pretty well for a guy with one good leg,” Howard remarks, unfazed. 

She smacks him lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t be a louse.”

“It was a compliment!” 

She sighs loudly, but lets him draw her in, his hands sure on her waist. Howard’s actually a fairly good dancer, when he can be torn away from the bar—in happier days, he and Maria used to show up Peggy and Steve all the time. 

“Did you hear about Nelson?” Howard asks quietly, his face near her ear.

She frowns. “Bill Nelson? CIA directorate of operations?”

“He’s out. Bush’ll make it official tomorrow.”

She blows out a breath. “That’s the third one this month.”

“Yeah, they’re really cleaning house over there.”

She’s silent for a moment. “Should we be worried?”

“About—”

“Us.”

“Well, technically, we’re an extra-governmental agency operating under federal oversight, if you’re worried about being ousted. They can’t actually replace us.”

“I meant should we would be worried about all these leaks.”

Howard sighs, and spins her around. “You know, you can’t really dance to Elton John,” he complains, half to himself. “You just kind of sway. Remember when people used to dance?”

“Howard.”

“What should we be worried about? We weren’t bugging any journalists. At least, not that I know about.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

She pulls away to look him in the eyes, but he’s staring out over the crowd. “I don’t think so,” he says finally. “I’m guessing the bulk of what they’ll get their hands on is from the fifties, and we weren’t really involved then. The CIA caught wind years ago and destroyed the worst of it.”

“As did we,” she reminds him. 

He looks at her then, and something passes between them. 

“Peggy,” he starts, and then closes his mouth, looking away. He gracefully turns her across the floor. 

“It'll all turn out alright,” he says finally, and she thinks that he’s trying to convince the both of them.

She misses Steve. 

1978 – ( _t_ )5

Steve passes by the warm lights of the movie theater on his way home, pushing through the crowd of excited, chattering teenagers undoubtedly just exiting _Grease_. 

He hasn’t seen it, although he has the vague recollection that it’s one of the movies that will still be a part of the cultural landscape in the future. From the poster alone, he can tell that the movie will basically be a caricature of the time, poodle-skirts and pompadours hazily rendered through a seventies mien—he can’t imagine anyone in the fifties wearing a teased disco perm or a shoulder-baring cat-suit. 

Fifties nostalgia is in full swing, these days, which makes him feel uncomfortably _old_ for the first time in memory. For the most part, he gets it, especially now that hindsight allows him to view the decades as distinct entities, each with its own tenor and palette. Though imperfect, a dreamy sense of prosperity and steady upward mobility had characterized the fifties--a trajectory had gone radically sideways during the tumultuous cacophony of the sixties, both of them unsustainable. In contrast, the seventies feels like _realism_ finally settling it—a comparatively drab decade of apathy and insecurity, featuring a recession and energy crisis at the tail end of a pointless, unsuccessful war.

Of course, _American Graffiti_ and _Grease_ and _Happy Days_ represent a sanitized, romanticized fifties that never really was—a time collectively conjured from memory and longing. Sometimes, Steve wonders if the fifties that he remembers is just as mythologized—he and Peggy perfectly in sync, Steve himself wholly content for the very first time. Lately, he’s felt restless and discomfited, adrift in his “retirement”. Although he and Peggy have long-since reconciled their formerly brewing resentments with each other, he can never return to a time when all he’d felt for her was helpless adoration, and she was without flaw in his eyes.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing.

He’d read somewhere that the word _nostalgia_ is Greek, a combination of the words for “pain” and “homecoming”, and he finds the etymology sadly apt. The nostalgia he feels for the fifties hasn’t anything to do with malt shops or jukeboxes or even Pax Americana; instead, he misses that implacable feeling of being _home_ —like he was exactly where he was supposed to be, for the first time in his life. 

Passing through the park, he stops to sit on a bench and watch the early sunset. A busker near the fence is playing guitar and singing a passable version of _Three Times a Lady._

The years have hurtled forward at an alarming pace. It feels like just yesterday that they were celebrating the half-century turn, and now the fifties are far enough away to be considered history. It’s almost 1980. 

He tries to squash the creeping feeling that the best years of his life are already behind him.

The busker changes keys. “So…so you think you can tell heaven from hell?”

Steve turns a bit to look at him. The busker is older than Steve had expected—in his early thirties, maybe, but he’s dressed in an outdated fringed vest and faded jeans, a rolled bandana tied around his head. The Age of Aquarius had roared in like a lion and gone out like a shrug, its former devotees long-since pivoted to more mundane pursuits. They have real jobs now, and bills to pay. Mortgages. 

“Do you think you can tell?”

The busker’s voice is pleasant enough, and the song sounds vaguely familiar. The Moody Blues, maybe? 

“Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?”

No—Pink Floyd. He recognizes the song, now. He’s heard it once before and it had made him uncomfortable then, too.

“Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?”

All at once, Steve feels a strange mix of pity and resentment towards this busker whistling past the graveyard. The hippie movement had probably officially ended with the Vietnam War, but it had been dwindling down since mid-1969. The one-two punch of the Manson Murders and proliferation of speed—and the ensuing violence—on the Haight had effectively ensured its collapse. Surely, the busker must realize that he needs to move on, and stop relentlessly clinging to a time that’s past and will never come again. His cause is dead, and the war’s over. Why can’t the busker understand this?

“Running over the same old ground—what have we found? The same old fears. Wish you were here.”

Steve abruptly leaves his bench, and walks until he can no longer hear the song. It’s Peggy’s birthday this month, and he has no idea what on earth he should give her. 

1979 – ( _t_ )5

Proxy wars rage overseas but for Steve, life feels peaceful in 1979. Sometimes he thinks that the burst dam during the MK-ULTRA hearings had forced them both to confront certain truths about their feelings, and that their marriage is ultimately better for it.

ESPN debuts on television, to Steve’s surprise and pleasure. He’d almost forgotten about it. 

He forces himself to sit through _The Deer Hunter_. 

He leaves halfway through _Superman_.

1980 – ( _t_ )5

It’s amusing to Steve that most of his friends are disappointed with _The Empire Strikes Back_. In the Future, _Star Wars_ was invariably among the pop-culture suggestions that people made to him, and almost inevitably someone would add that _Empire_ was by far the best of the three (or six—he’d watched the “newer” movies out of curiosity, although Sam had warned him that they sucked, and he’d only made it halfway through _Attack of the Clones_ before he really couldn’t take it anymore). 

He’s quietly delighted to hear everyone complain about how depressing _Empire_ is, since “dark and gritty” will be hallmarks of cinematic sophistication in the Future. Personally, he’d preferred _Star Wars_ —hopeful and uncomplicated, with a neat, happy ending—but even so he can’t get enough of everyone’s reaction to the biggest cinematic twist of all time. 

Peggy allows herself to be dragged out to the cinema with Steve, although he knows that she secretly can’t stand science-fiction, despite his best efforts. She dutifully gasps along with the crowd when Darth Vader drops his bombshell line. Steve grins to himself, but finds it sliding right off his face when Han Solo is frozen in carbonite. 

He’d somehow forgotten all about this part. 

When they throw the block of carbonite ice to the floor, revealing Han Solo’s face frozen in a rictus of pain, Steve accidentally clenches his hand down so hard on the armrest that it cracks, and Peggy whips around to look at him.

“Are you alright?” she whispers, frowning. 

He nods, but doesn’t speak again until they leave the theater. He’s taciturn through dinner, unable to clear half-imagined images from his mind. 

Peggy keeps glancing at him while they clean the dishes together. Finally, she says, carefully, “I’m sure he’ll be fine in the next film, you know.”

He nods, and she sighs, running a frustrated hand through her curls. “Except we both know that that’s not what’s upset you. Steve, can’t you—” she stops, suddenly, and her eyes go wide with horror, her hand moving to her mouth. “Oh, my darling.” 

Steve’s confused when she sets down her dishtowel and folds her arms around him, but then she whispers, “I’d forgotten. How could I have forgotten?”

He panics for a moment until he realizes that she must be thinking of _him_. Of Steve, frozen under the ice for seventy years. He _had_ told her that part of it, after all. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, clutching him tightly. 

He leans on her shoulders, still square and strong. He voices nothing but still tastes the lie as he allows her to comfort him with soothing words and gentle hands. 

He closes his eyes and he sees the picture of Bucky on ice, gaunt as a corpse and blue-skinned from the cold. 

Even in Wakanda, Bucky had never really talked about what had happened to him, but he must have known that Steve had read his file. A sparse, clinically written document detailing the bloody atrocities deemed necessary to carve a man’s soul from his body.

In the brief time he’d spent there awake, Bucky had preferred to be in the sun. He’d stretch out like a cat, shirtless, and Steve would stare at his perfect, tanned skin and think about how it belied a thousand cuts and lashes and burns. Once, under a particularly hot noon-glare, Bucky had offhandedly told him that he’d rather burn than freeze. “I’ve frozen to death too many times,” he’d added carelessly, seemingly apropos of nothing. After a pause, he’d glanced at Steve, and then away. 

Steve had remained silent, not sure of what to say. 

He’d said nothing then, just as he’d said nothing when Bucky told him that he blamed himself for everything that happened. Just as he said nothing when Bucky told him that he wanted to go back into cryo-freeze. 

It was just—easier not to.

Had Bucky actually wanted comfort from Steve? Even back in Brooklyn, neither of them had talked much about their feelings, but Bucky had always offered tactile reassurance—a careless arm slung around Steve’s shoulders, a soothing hand steadying Steve’s coughing back. And then, once or twice, Bucky’s unerring resolve to protect Steve Rogers had prompted him to shed his insouciant persona just long enough to tell Steve exactly what he needed to hear.

 _I’m with you to the end of the line, pal._

They hadn’t spent too much time together outside of dire circumstances in the Future—Bucky’d lasted only about a week before going back into cryo-freeze in Wakanda—and they’d exchanged a few brief hugs, but nothing more.

Bucky’s face hadn’t changed when Steve had told him that he was going to remain in the past, with Peggy. He’d merely nodded, and then after a beat he’d smiled, eyes unreadable, and clapped Steve on the shoulder. “You deserve it, Stevie,” is all he’d said.

Steve wishes now that he’d said more. Words had never failed him with the Avengers—he’d always been able to summon the right thing to say, whether the moment called for a rousing declamation or quiet encouragement. He’s well aware that for all their teasing about how old-fashioned mannerisms and supposed prudishness, he’d been viewed as a sort of moral authority by most of the team—even by Tony, in a strange, inverted fashion. In a group fraught with baggage of one sort or another, he’d sensed it, from time to time, whether in a hesitant glance or a deliberate moment of vulnerability—the silent appeal for him to quell certain internal uncertainties. 

_We try to save as many people as we can. Sometimes that doesn’t mean everybody._

_If it was the other way around and it was down to me to save your life—now, you be honest with me—would you trust me to do it?_

He’d never had any trouble summoning the right words to strengthen their resolve. 

And then when Bucky had voiced the unasked question— _but I did it_ —Steve had let the words hang in the air, unanswered. He doesn’t really know why. 

He lets Peggy pet his hair and whisper soothing platitudes. He thinks about hypodermic needles and LSD and _effective and practical techniques to render an individual subservient to an imposed will or control._

He feels distinctly unworthy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So here’s the thing: intelligence during this time period was like the Wild West. There’s simply no way that Peggy Carter could have been the director of an intelligence agency during this time period and kept her hands clean. At the very least, if she were ANY good at her job, she would have had full knowledge of some dirty, dirty deeds. We know she was involved with Operation Paperclip, and was okay with on-boarding Zola, knowing for a fact that he killed dozens of American POWs Mengele-style. 
> 
> I was kind of struck by that scene in Endgame where Howard is wandering around Lehigh calling for Zola all familiar-like. I know it was supposed to just be an Easter Egg, but – awfully chummy with the Nazi human experimentation-guy, aren’t you? 
> 
> Anyway, I think Steve would have been at least slightly disillusioned by her, at some point, since he had her so high on a pedestal.
> 
> Also, that thing with the kids? Totally happened to me, at a seriously cool magic act. Creepy as hell. 
> 
> Historical Footnotes: 
> 
> So here we go – the mid-‘50s to the ‘70s was sort of open season for intelligence agencies, especially the CIA. Bush Sr.’s tenure is generally viewed as a positive turning point for this (per cia.gov). 
> 
> MKULTRA was a CIA program that’s sort of used as goofy shorthand now, but was worse than you probably think. It pretty much followed the trajectory I’ve written. Essentially, there was this weird focus on mind-control during the Cold War, and everyone was trying to make a Manchurian Candidate. The CIA drugged/experimented on a lot unwitting test subjects and tried to induce amnesia, mental illness, change allegiances, etc. 
> 
> Louis “Jolly” West was an MKULTRA agent and big fan of mind-control experiments. He also publicly requested funding to start an institution wherein he would use brainwashing and brain surgery to change the behavior of prisoners. And then killed an elephant with LSD. Yeah.
> 
> I spend ages trying to figure out if the ’77 hearings were public knowledge! Everything from those newspaper articles is an actual quote. I don’t know what AO3’s policy on this is, but here they are (cited, like a giant nerd):
> 
> “PRIVATE INSTITUTIONS USED IN CAL EFFORT TO CONTROL BEHAVIOR.” NYTimes, 2 Aug. 1977, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/02/archives/private-institutions-used-in-cia-effort-to-control-behavior-25year.html.
> 
> “Mind‐Control Studies Had Origins in Trial of Mindszenty.” NYTimes, 2 Aug. 1977, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/02/archives/mindcontrol-studies-had-origins-in-trial-of-mindszenty.html. 
> 
> Times, Nicholas. “C.I.A. Data Show 14‐Year Project On Controlling Human Behavior.” NYTimes, 21 July 1977, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/07/21/archives/cia-data-show-14year-project-on-controlling-human-behavior-data.html. 
> 
> I kind of jammed them together and changed one quoted word (“it” to “they”).


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enjoy! :D

1981 – ( _t_ )5

Attending society events had been a necessary evil in the Future, but at least Steve had been able to beg off on mysterious world-saving business, then.

He never has an excuse for why he can’t accompany Peggy to the latest gala or fundraiser or dedication, and so he almost always has to go. Naturally, Howard is the one hosting a good number of these events, and as his fellow SHIELD co-founder, Peggy’s attendance is expected. Even, apparently, at the Starks’ annual Christmas party. In the old days, he and Peggy used to spend Christmas beside a roaring fire, exchanging little gifts and roasting actual honest-to-God chestnuts, but this is the third year in a row that he’s been surrounded by ostentation, hors d’ouerves, and at least twelve giant fake trees, all immaculately decorated and somehow soulless. 

Sometimes he worries that Peggy’s grown bored with just the two of them at home and needs something grander to mark the holiday as something special. 

He’s also beginning to understand just why Tony had harbored such a complex about his father. He’d cringed when Tony had made a clearly reluctant command performance at Howard’s drunken behest, slowly descending the stairs to join his family with the eyes of a hundred anonymous partygoers on him. Howard wraps his arms around both Maria and Tony’s shoulders, squeezing them uncomfortably close. Maria’s red-lipped smile is strained to its limits. Tony’s young face appears mortified. After a few trite remarks about the importance of family at Christmastime, Howard dismisses Tony and gives Maria a loud, careless kiss to the side of her forehead. 

Steve sees Tony snag a glass of God knows what from a passing waiter as he hurries through the crowd, probably heading back to the safety of his room. 

Howard’s drinking problem is an open secret at this point, but nobody but Peggy has the guts to call him out on it. Howard’s behavior towards Steve has descended into downright nastiness, particularly when he drinks, and Steve spends most Stark events trying desperately to avoid him at all costs. When they’re alone, Howard is intolerable. For all his intellect, Howard isn’t a subtle man, and it’s obvious that he resents Steve more with every passing political assassination or international tragedy that he clearly thinks Steve could have prevented. 

Howard’s in rare form tonight, a semi-circle of a dozen or so eager sycophants hanging on his every word. In the spirit of Christmas nostalgia, apparently, he’s regaling them all with tales of his exploits from World War II.

Steve tries to block it out, but looks over when he hears Howard mention _Captain America_. Howard is unsubtly pretending not to look at Steve while he talks, his voice loud enough to hear clearly from where Steve is sitting. 

“Of course, what people _really_ don’t realize is that he wasn’t exactly hero-material to begin with,” Howard is saying. “Just a skinny little rat until we pumped him full of steroids.”

The crowd around Howard laughs as he grins unrepentantly, his eyes flickering over to Steve. 

_You’re a laboratory experiment, Rogers._

From across the room, Steve sees Peggy glance over from where she’s talking with a visiting dignitary’s wife.

“I mean, he was on the USO tour for the better part of the war! Used all those big synthetic muscles in the kick-line!”

_Everything special about you came out of a bottle._

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, don’t get me wrong, he’s a hero and all,” Howard generously allows, and the crowd hums in eager agreement, clearly anticipating a punch-line.

Peggy begins to make her way towards where Steve is sitting, her bearing deceptively casual and her smile rigid. 

“But I gotta say, I always wondered about him, you know? I mean, I know everyone said he was sweet on our Pegs—” he raises a glass in her direction, and the crowd happily raise their own in imitation, “—I mean, our Dear Mrs. McCauley! But you gotta wonder, right—and I mean, most people don’t know this, because it didn’t make the movie—but you know he never really got deployed? The whole reason he got involved in the War at all was because his, uh, former— _roommate_ —got captured by the Nazis. Charged off to rescue him just like a knight in shining armor.”

Howard’s knowing tone leaves little room for doubt as to what he’s insinuating. His listeners look gleefully shocked.

Steve clenches the glass in his hand, feeling it splinter into his palm.

Now, I’m not calling Captain America a queer, or anything,” Howard says, raising his hands in exaggerated protest, “But c’mon, I’m just saying, right? It’s not like he ditched the most beautiful chorus girls in America to storm the beaches or anything. He literally went after just the one guy.” He smirks. “Must’ve been some bachelor pad, that’s all I’m saying.”

_Even when I had nothing, I had Bucky._

The sound of Steve’s glass shattering is lost in the scandalized laughter.

“Ah, c’mon, now,” one man argues good-naturedly, raising his voice to be heard over the titters, “We’ve all heard the ‘Captain America rescues his childhood pal’ thing, it’s just a feel-good story.”

“I didn’t,” another man retorts, “But then I didn’t read the comics cover to cover like you did, Tom.”

Tom reddens as the onlookers laugh again, but insists, “He’s just pulling our leg, aren’t you, Stark?

Howard shrugs theatrically, in rare form. “For what it’s worth, I knew the roommate, too. Limp-wristed is putting it lightly.” He glances over at Steve.

_I know guys with none of that worth ten of you._

Steve stands to do God knows what, and feels a familiar hand clench down on his forearm. 

“Not here, darling,” Peggy hisses through clenched teeth, wide smile firmly-affixed as she expertly steers him out of earshot. “You’ve got to _get ahold of yourself_ , Steve.”

He lets her maneuver him over to the opposite corner of the room before shaking off her hand. “I’m going home,” he tells her shortly, not caring what it will look like. “You can come or stay.”

She leaves with him, of course, clearly frustrated.

“You know,” she begins once they get into the car, her expression long-suffering, “You really mustn’t let Howard get to you like that. You _know_ how he is, Steve, he’s just doing it to get a rise out of you.”

“So I just have to sit there and listen to that?” Steve retorts, his temper rising. “Did you hear what he _said_?”

“It doesn’t _matter_ what he said, Steve. What matters is that you don’t allow yourself to be made a fool out of by taking the bait.”

“ _Me_ 'make a fool of myself’?” Steve asks incredulously. “Pegs, he’s practically a full-blown alcoholic at this rate! Do you really think that it’s okay, the way he’s been acting?” 

“He’s been under a lot of stress lately,” she answers, never one to back down, “We’re in the middle of a Cold War, if you haven’t noticed. For God’s sake, there are Americans being held hostage in Iran as we speak!”

Something in her tone makes Steve look at her. She’s looking out the window, refusing to meet his gaze, her lips a tight, angry line.

“Is that what this is really about?” he asks. “Are you really taking his side?”

“I’m not _taking anyone’s side_ , Steve, I’m just asking you to understand that Howard and I have been trying to prevent _nuclear war_ for the past decade or so, and—”

“—are you seriously _still_ angry that I haven’t been telling you about the future? I thought we’d been over this!—”

“—really, the stress has been quite unbearable for _me_ , and that’s me without running a _company_ and raising a _child_.”

Steve temper flares. “Yes, poor Howard is under a lot of stress,” he agrees sarcastically, feeling ugly, “Which totally excuses what he said about Bucky. Did you _hear_ him, he basically told everyone at the party that Bucky was a—” 

“Oh, _Bucky_ ,” she interrupts suddenly, her voice uncharacteristically venomous. “I wish you’d get over this—this _mental shrine_ you’ve erected to James bloody Barnes. I know he saved your life, Steve, and of course he wasn’t a—a homosexual, but be honest with yourself about him for _once_. He was a drunken lout, hardly the saint you make him out to be in your memories, and if he’d survived the war it’s hardly likely you’d even remember him at this rate.”

Steve physically recoils, feeling as though he’d been slapped. He wrenches the steering wheel to one side and pulls the car straight of the road, bringing it to a screeching halt. They sit there in heated silence.

_Your pal, your buddy, your_ Bucky.

It’s 1980 and somewhere in Siberia, Bucky is trapped, frozen in a metal tank, dehumanized and unmade and completely alone. It’s the price he paid to pick up that shield and save Captain America, and Steve is repaying him now by letting it happen all over again.

_I’m with you to the end of the line, pal._

“Peggy, I love you,” he says finally. “But I don’t want to hear another word about Bucky. From you or from Howard. Ever.”

They’re both silent for a long time. He casts her a sidelong glance. She stares straight ahead, lips pursed, and for once, he can’t tell what she’s thinking, at all.

“Alright.” 

He can’t read the inflection in the word, but all at once he’s achingly tired, in a way he can’t remember being since before the serum. He doesn’t say a word, just puts the car back in gear and drives back onto the road. 

They don’t talk as they ready for bed, but Peggy does give his arm what he thinks is an apologetic squeeze when they brush past each other. A small touch to stop the gap between them from widening ever further. 

He stares at the ceiling long after she’s fallen asleep. The comforting burn of self-righteous anger he’d felt towards Howard has since been replaced by the oily feeling of guilt. He doesn’t think that Howard and Bucky had ever had occasion to meet, let alone speak to one another, and it’s likely that Howard probably doesn’t remember Bucky one way or another. In retrospect, it’s clear that Howard was just trying to provoke Steve, for whatever reason. 

He’d forgotten, for just a moment, that Bucky doesn’t need Steve to defend his reputation. Not against Howard, who is blissfully ignorant of the ticking clock. 

Bucky will take his own revenge. 

Soon.

1982 – ( _t_ )5

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is being dedicated in a month or so, but Steve’s outright refusing to attend despite Peggy’s coaxing. She’s seen a preview, of course, and she tells him that it’s nothing like the storm-tossed statues at Arlington—it’s peaceful, she says, a quiet wall meant for reflection and contemplation.

She’s even shown him pictures, and she’s right—there are no images of war. But the thought of standing in front of that implacable wall of the dead sends his heart racing. Every single one of those men died bloody, and he can’t help but picture it in his head. Young boys in oversized uniforms, the same pinched look of hunger in their faces. Young boys with dark hair and sad grey eyes. 

He knows what it sounds like when men die in combat. He’s heard their screams. 

Just lately, he’s been hearing them in his sleep. 

It’s why he feels so exhausted tonight, even though it’s barely eight o’clock. He’s trying to make up for his refusal to attend the dedication by lifting his moratorium on Stark Industry events, a decision he’d started regretting before he’d even reached the coat-check. 

Thank God alcohol is starting to work on him again. 

“Steve!” Peggy bears down on him with a man on her arm, smiling. “I want you to meet one of my favorite colleagues.”

Steve smiles politely, and then his stomach drops as the man’s face registers.

“Alex,” Alexander Pierce says, grinning and holding out his hand. “Good to meet you, Steve.”

Dazed, Steve takes it. From the sharp way Peggy is looking at him, the consternation must be showing on his face, and he tries to school his expression into something friendly.

“Likewise,” he says. His smile feels like a rictus.

Pierce’s easy grin falters, but he tries, “Peggy tells me you’re an architect?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, willing himself to sound jovial. “Yes. HLM, if you’re familiar.”

Pierce isn’t, but of course that doesn’t matter. Pierce makes polite small talk, preternaturally friendly, and Steve puts all of his willpower into seeming normal. He thinks that it mostly works—at least, Peggy seems to relax—and to his everlasting relief Daniel appears and steers them both away to deal with some potential emergency, leaving Steve to white-knuckle his glass.

She’s probably going to question Steve later about his reaction. Understandably, she’ll want to know why her husband had acted so strangely. If he’s going to tell her, this is the time. He should tell her that her handsome young colleague is an insidious monster who will twist everything she's worked for. Steve is letting it happen right in front of his eyes.

But—

No matter what Steve does—no matter what he says—the odds of them beating Thanos the first time around was something like fourteen billion to one. In 2023, the Avengers will need to know exactly where each Stone is located, or they will lose. If he alters this timeline now, he will change the course of history, and put the Stones out of reach, putting the lives of billions of people in this timeline in jeopardy. 

In some ways, this is the universe he's created. Although he’s chosen to sit on the sidelines, in this one sense, it’s his responsibility to make sure that it isn’t destroyed.

In the end, the potential emergency turns out to be a full-blown crisis, and the matter is forgotten entirely. 

1983 – ( _t_ )5

Steve sees _Return of the Jedi_ with John, since neither of their wives have any interest in going. John has sort of become Steve’s movie-buddy, anyway—Peggy is far too busy with SHIELD to go to the cinema, and she’s finally admitted that she’s got no interest in _aliens or anything of that sort, Steve._

It’s a bit of a win-win for Steve, too, since Peggy is far too critical of entertainment to really enjoy herself, whereas Steve likes to just shut off his brain and relax. 

Predictably, John is blown away by the revelation that Leia is Luke’s sister, even though Steve himself had been a bit iffy on it. 

_“So, what I told you was true. From a certain point of view.”_

“Genius!” John whispers to Steve, snorting, “I’m going to use that line with Stella if I she ever catches me in a lie.”

John loves Stella so unabashedly that Steve can’t ever imagine him lying to her, but he knows that John is probably talking about cutesy, domestic fibs—things like eating the last cookie, or how he feels about his mother-in-law’s meatloaf.

For a moment, Steve is painfully jealous. Although he's never outright lied, he’ll never _not_ be able to keep secrets from Peggy, and they both know it. He’s sure that she must think he’s faked his knowledge or lack thereof at least a dozen times, even when an event really does take him by surprise. He’d never even known that JFK had _had_ a brother, let alone read anything about Bobby Kennedy in the Future, and the assassination had been as much a shock to Steve as it had been to everyone else, but Peggy had still seemed faintly skeptical of his disbelief. Unbidden or not, that swift look of doubt at his reaction had cut him deeply. 

These days, he misses the sweet honesty that had once characterized their relationship, back before he’d crashed a plane into the ice. 

Sometimes, he wonders what life would have been like if he’d managed to simply stop the Valkyrie from taking off in the first place—what his marriage would have been like absent the lingering specter of mistrust.

He pushes it out of his mind, and tries to concentrate instead on John’s frank bewilderment when the little teddy-bear warriors are introduced.

* * *

“Good lord,” Peggy says, her tone overly casual, “Is that me?”

Steve looks up from his sketchpad. Almost without realizing it, he’d been drawing Peggy as she’d looked during the War—young Peggy, with her Victory Rolls and her red lips. 

“Yeah,” he answers, turning it around to face her. “What do you think?”

She studies it, her lips pursed. “Well, I’m afraid it looks nothing like me, now.”

Internally, he winces. He should have known that she would be sensitive to this—how could she not be? He looks a good fifteen years younger than her, these days. 

Her eyes take on a distant cast. “How young we all were,” she murmurs, and he thinks he hears a hint of regret in her voice. 

She picks up the sketchbook, and flips through it, idly. Most of Steve’s sketches are of people that he sees out and about; in the park, or having coffee on a lazy Saturday morning. Some of them are of friends of his; she smiles at a picture of Andy Green, a co-worker with a perpetual baby-face and an infectious grin.

She stops for a moment on a picture he can’t quite see, a tiny frown creasing her forehead. 

“Who is this?” she asks.

He reaches over and tilts the sketchbook toward himself, a sinking feeling in his stomach. He tries not to draw too much from the Future, but sometimes—

He’d drawn her as he’d first known her, with her hair bobbed in an outdated, almost fifties-style coif. He’d posed her peering through long lashes at her viewer; her secretive smirk still not quite captured the way he’d wanted to. It’s a markedly different sort of sketch from the others in the book, almost palpably intimate; anyone, let alone Peggy, might think her a former paramour.

Peggy’s face is impassive. 

_No-one_ , he wants to tell her, _a girl at the coffee shop_ , but he’s never lied to Peggy before.

“She’s from the Future,” he tells her, gently. “I worked with her.”

_Was that your first kiss since 1945?_

It sounds like a lie, even though it’s true enough.

Peggy raises a brow, but says nothing. She touches a finger gently to the page, but sounds business-like enough when she asks, briskly, “So, this style comes back into fashion in the—the two-thousands? What do you call it?” 

“The ‘oughts’, some people said. And—not really. She changed her hair a lot.”

Peggy looks at him askance, and then hands him back the book. “Pretty,” is all she says, and then walks away, pulling her dignity around her like a cloak.

He closes his eyes.

There’s a sketchbook upstairs, hidden in his dresser drawer. It contains pictures that Steve had once tried to remove from his head by trapping them in charcoal; pictures of young girls with glowing eyes and wild, long hair; of gods surrounded by lightning; of metal suits of armor that can fly. He’d meant to burn it after he’d filled each page, the way he had the first notebook, but he’d been seized by the sudden wild thought that he might be burning them all right out of existence.

Ridiculous, of course—just some latent Irish superstition suddenly rising to the forefront of his mind—but after all, he’s created worlds; who’s to say he can’t destroy them just as easily? He should get rid of it—if Peggy ever finds it, she’ll have many more questions that he won’t be able to answer. She might even mention the metal suit to Howard. 

It’s just that his memory isn’t quite what it used to be, these days. The relentless ghosts of futures past that haunt him are still present, but indistinct, somehow—some days he can’t quite picture their faces. It’s not as though he has any pictures to look at, and revisiting his sketchbook is the best option he’s got.

He carefully rips the picture of Natasha from the sketchbook in his hands, and flips through it quickly to make sure no more errant Avengers sketchers are waiting to be discovered. Then he takes the picture upstairs, and lays it on the bed while he carefully pulls out the hidden book.

He thumbs through it slowly. He has his favorite pictures, even among his own drawings—some he’d drawn to aid fond remembrance, and some he’d drawn to try to exorcise the image from his head. 

Sam, dressed in his Falcon uniform, his head thrown back in laughter. 

Thor, his hair cropped close and his axe held overhead, floating high above the darkening clouds as though buoyed by his own rage.

Banner, the way Steve likes to remember him, before he’d become a grotesque amalgamation of human and Hulk.

Natasha the way he’d thought her prettiest, with her hair falling straight down towards her shoulders.

The one person missing from the gallery of friends and enemies and things half-remembered is Bucky. Steve hasn’t drawn Bucky in almost ten years—not since he’d burned the only sketchbook with Bucky’s pictures in it. Every time he’d tried to draw Bucky smiling or in repose it had come out wrong, and instead he’d found himself drawing page after page of the Winter Soldier, his mouth muzzled and his eyes accusing. 

He doesn’t want to remember Bucky—at this point, he’s actively trying not to—but he can’t seem to escape him. Bucky dogs him through the years. Steve sees Bucky’s face on every hollow-eyed veteran he passes begging on the street. He sees Bucky’s hand in every terrorist attack and undeclared skirmish and government conspiracy theory. Steve shakes the hands of Peggy’s colleagues and wonders which of them are secretly agents of HYDRA. He feels the unrelenting clench of that metal hand against his own throat every time he looks at Howard Stark and mentally counts down to 1991.

What would his life had been like if Bucky had just died in the Alps, like he was meant to? Steve certainly wouldn’t have spent years on the run from the United States government. More importantly, his life here would be infinitely easier. Unwittingly, Bucky has been the architect of a number of tiny moments between Steve and Peggy that have steadily fostered the seeds of mistrust between them. She wouldn’t think he was lying about the Winter Soldier Investigation—he would have read about MK-ULTRA and simply chalked it up to a CIA initiative. 

The promise that had once buoyed him through some of the lowest points of his life now feels like a curse that Steve cannot shake.

_I’m with you to the end of the line, pal._

No matter where Steve goes—to the ice, to the future, to the past—Bucky will _always_ be there, waiting. 

1984 – ( _t_ )5

It’s a hot summer day in 1984, and Steve is suddenly reminded that Natasha Romanov will be born this year. 

In his latest ostentatious effort at making amends, Howard has somehow gotten them priority seating for almost every big Olympic event on schedule, and Steve and Peggy have spent a happy three days in Los Angeles trying to cram everything in.

Steve had been at women’s gymnastics, of all things, and he’d been watching an impossibly tiny Romanian girl walking calmly up to the uneven bars when the thought had suddenly sprung unbidden into his head. Now that he’s thought it, he can’t help but see Natasha in every preternaturally serious little gymnast, even though the Soviets aren’t even here, this year.

He imagines that it’s Natasha balancing carefully on the beam, pointing an elegant toe and wind-milling a skinny leg through the air. He pictures that slim white hand holding a knife. 

He looks away.

Later, Steve and Peggy stroll arm in arm through streams of colorful, chattering tourists. More and more, Steve’s starting to hear a familiar, rising pitch at the end of the phrase—“valley girl” speak, Peggy informs him. In the future, they’ll call it “up-speak”, and it will be ubiquitous.

In general, Steve finds the eighties discomfiting. While he wasn’t paying attention there’s been an abrupt paradigm shift, and things suddenly seem _modern_ in an unmistakable, uncomfortable way. There was a distinct dichotomy between the past few decades and the gleaming digital chrome of the twenty-first century, enough that they’d almost seemed to be different worlds. Even the seventies had seemed muted and dreamlike compared to this sudden harsh cacophony of synth and neon. To Steve, it seems simultaneously futuristic and outdated. 

Even though the day-glo patterns and shoulder-pads are antithetical to the sleek monochrome he woke up to in 2011, the music, the movies, the abrupt prevalence of computers and teen-beat models and MTV—they all veer a little too close to what Steve remembers. Suddenly, the future stops being an exciting prospect, and starts to feel like an inevitable reckoning—like he’s _returning_ to that place.

Bolstering this portent is the strange fact that Steve is familiar with almost every big movie on the marquee. Sure, he’d recognized the big classics over the years— _Star Wars_ , _Jaws_ , _The Godfather_ —but in 1984 it seems like every other week, one of the blockbusters he’d painstakingly added to his catch-up list debuts in theaters. _The Terminator_ , _Ghostbusters_ , _Footloose_ , _Beverly Hills Cop_. _The Karate Kid_. 

The Video Music Awards had debuted this year, too, catapulting Madonna onto every magazine cover in America. Like most things he encounters these days, Steve finds her simultaneously shocking and outdated; although the shameless commercialization of her own frank sexuality certainly counts as outrageous in 1984, a woman writhing around in a full wedding dress seems almost quaint compared to the few music videos he’d seen on his laptop. Still, she’s a household name who will still be a household name when Steve Rogers wakes up in a makeshift SHIELD containment room.

Realistically, he’s got well over twenty years left until he’ll actually come full circle, but the future suddenly seems alarmingly close.

Now that the matter is fast-approaching, Steve finds that he doesn't like to think about what will happen when Captain America is found in this reality. How odd it will be to have a younger version of himself running around. He used to think it would be amusing; that he would watch events unfold with Peggy, secure in the knowledge of his eventual victory, but now he’s not so sure. Sometimes, he feels that he’s almost an entirely different person that the man who will come out of the ice, and these days he’s not sure how he feels about it.

1985 – ( _t_ )5

“Steve,” Peggy says evenly. “I need to ask you something. I understand that you can’t—jeopardize our future, but I believe you’ve already given yourself away on this front.”

Steve steels himself. Peggy rarely asks him to shed light on future events, and it’s even more rare that he actually can. Peggy works with clandestine matters of state security, and luckily Steve only knows the history he’d missed in very broad strokes. 

“Okay,” he says, matching her serious tone. “But I can’t promise anything.”

She purses her lips. “I understand. But I’m asking you.” 

They look at each-other for a long moment.

“The Winter Soldier,” she says finally, and Steve feels the blood drain from his face. He’d never known if Peggy had had any involvement in this particular affair, and he’d simply hoped for the best. 

Peggy searches his face. “It’s just that I remember that you—reacted somewhat badly, when I mentioned it. I can see it in your face, sometimes, when something jogs your memory. I can’t help but wonder, you know, what’s coming, and it’s often very difficult for me not to pester it out of you.”

Steve knows it must be difficult for her, living with an unforthcoming Nostradamus. True to form, Peggy takes it in stride, and rarely mentions his little slip-ups. It’s just one of the myriad ways that he’s been lucky in her. 

He waits for the question.

“You may or may not know that there’s talk amongst the intelligence community about a—certain series of assassinations. Of course, it’s an absurd notion, isn’t it, that a mysterious Russian operative has been active for over fifty years. Quite impossible, really. It’s just that I couldn’t help but wonder, when I heard what they were calling him, whether you might have heard the name before.”

Her voice is harder now. “After all, you were quite clearly disconcerted when I went mentioned the Winter Soldier inquiry, yet you claimed never to have heard about the investigation in Vietnam. What do you think, Steve?”

Scenarios race through Steve’s brain. He cannot tell Peggy that the ghost stories are real—that the Winter Soldier is a nigh-unstoppable assassin who may very well kill several of Peggy’s colleagues before the decade is out. He can’t tell her that the Winter Soldier runs on a bastardized version of the super-serum, or that he wields a metal arm. 

He absolutely can’t tell her that the Winter Soldier is—and has always been—Bucky.

Any information that he gives to Peggy now may irrevocably alter the future in potentially catastrophic ways.

But he’s never lied to Peggy.

“I’d never heard of the investigation in Vietnam,” he tells her quietly, willing her to understand. “That’s all I can tell you.”

She draws in a breath. “Is it—what they think? A Russian operative?”

He can’t give the answer she needs to hear, but he can give her the truth. “No.”

From a certain point of view.

She stares at him, tight-lipped. “Alright,” she says finally, her voice unreadable. “Well, in that case, I’m needed back at the office.”

* * *

“Here,” Howard says, pulling a photo out of the file and handing it to Peggy. He’s clearly hung-over, but at least he’s sober. 

She studies it. It’s in black-and-white and out of focus, clearly taken from a security camera and blown up to magnify a certain individual. It’s a dark-haired man, features obscured by what looks like a mask of some sort. He looks like he’s wearing some sort of armor plating on one arm. 

“And this is all there is to go off of?”

“Beyond supposed witness sightings, yeah.”

Peggy sighs, and sets the picture down on her desk. “Well, this could be anyone. This may not even have been the assassin in Paris.”

Howard grabs the picture and squints at it. “Matches the reports, at least, and the time stamp. Soviet slug, no rifling.”

Peggy rubs her eyes. “I suppose.” 

“The real question here is why your sudden interest in the ‘Winter Soldier’? We’ve already confirmed that it’s just a crock, Pegs. Soviet propaganda. They want us scared of our shadows and seeing boogeymen in every corner, you know this.”

Howard looks hard at her, suddenly serious. “Unless you know something that the rest of us don’t.”

She looks up, startled. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, maybe this isn’t just a bullshit story, but the rest of us aren’t gonna know that until thirty years from now.”

“Why on earth would you think that? This is potentially a matter of international security, why _wouldn’t_ I be interested?”

“Because if you didn’t think there was something funny going on, you would have asked Thompson or Sousa to show you the file.”

Peggy sighs, and eases down to perch on the edge of the desk. She’s suddenly very tired. “It’s probably nothing. It was years ago, during Vietnam—remember, I attended the Winter Soldier media event? I just remember that at the time I mentioned it to him, his face went white, like I’d never seen. It was as though he’d seen a ghost.”

She shrugs limply.

“Of course, at the time I just thought he’d read about it, or seen the documentary himself. He’d had such trouble with Vietnam, you know, and I thought maybe there was some—I don’t know, atrocity we didn’t yet know about. But then I heard one of the field agents discussing this—this _Winter Soldier_ nonsense yesterday, and now I think it might be something entirely different.”

Howard sits down beside her. 

“I asked him, of course, but you know he can’t tell me anything.”

“Uh-huh,” Howard says skeptically. 

Howard isn’t a subtle man, but he’s as passive-aggressive as she is straightforward. She loathes it when he forces her to drag things out of him.

“Just say it.”

“Are you sure that this isn’t just—Steve being willing to let bad things happen?”

Peggy stares at him. “What exactly are you implying?” she asks coldly. 

Howard raises his hands in placation. “C’mon, I don’t mean that how it sounded. I just mean that—there’s lot of shit we easily could have stopped, if we’d only known about it. ”

_If he’d only let them know._

This isn’t the first time she’s heard Howard voice such a sentiment, but it is a refrain she’s been hearing more and more frequently from him. Howard has a tendency to blame everyone but himself for his self-perceived failings, and of late he’s chosen to lash out at Steve.

“Perhaps if he’d stopped those events, things would have gotten much worse.” It’s Steve’s line, and what she parrots to herself every time something horrible happens; that the alternative would have been much worse. 

“Or better,” Howard counters, standing again to pace. “C’mon, Pegs. You married the guy, doesn’t that change a hell of a lot right there? How is it going to cause horrible consequences if, I don’t know—” he waves a hand around, “RFK makes it?”

They’re thoughts she’s had herself over the years, but she can’t bring herself to voice them to Howard. Doing so would cross a certain line; betray Steve in some infinitesimal way that she can’t quite put her finger on. 

Maybe she would be admitting that Steve’s motives, such as they are, could be inherently selfish. Maybe she’s admitting that every time Steve fails to prevent devastation she can’t help but compare him to the Captain America she’d known before; the one who couldn’t bear to see injustice happen, if there was any way he could plausibly do something about it. Even if he were only ninety-seven pounds.

Peggy throws up her hands. “I don’t know,” she says wearily, “And I suppose none of us really can, including Steve. Better the devil that we—Steve—knows, I suppose.”

They sit quietly for a moment, and then she adds, “For what it’s worth, Steve tells me that he really didn’t have time to learn about everything that had happened in his—absence. Apparently, the future was mostly—more fighting, for him at least, and saving the world. Some of it he clearly recognizes—he’s really a terrible liar—but it really seems like most of this is just as new to him as it is to us. Or at least, if he knows about things, it’s not with any real specificity. He’s not a history book, after all.”

“And you believe him?”

Sometimes.

“Yes.”

Howard waves the black-and-white photo around. “And this is all just—what, coincidence?” 

“Yes.”

“Horseshit, Pegs.”

“I’m sure,” Peggy replies, giving him a faint half-smile, “That this has nothing to do with the fact that he refuses to speak to you these days. I can’t say I blame him, Howard, you pushed him too far one too many times.” She pauses and then adds, dryly, “He’s awfully sensitive about Sergeant Barnes.”

Howard sighs and sits heavily into a chair. “Fucking Barnes,” he mutters, slapping the Winter Soldier picture down on a desk. “I don’t even remember that little twerp.”

“Not much worth remembering, in my opinion,” she admits, “Although I suppose he did save Steve’s life. You really struck a nerve there, Howard.”

“Yeah,” Howard snorts humorlessly, “I’m pretty good at that, these days.”

“You could try to make amends, you know?” Peggy suggests gently. “I’m sure he misses you, too.”

“Yeah,” Howard repeats, his face morose. 

Later, as she’s leaving, Howard calls out, “Should I dedicate some big memorial to Barnes? Think that’d do it, Pegs?”

She laughs, and waves a hand at him without turning around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you're enjoying it! We're closing in on the end (I swear). Comments are appreciated!
> 
> Historical Footnotes!
> 
> For once, not much! Except that an impressive amount of classic movies debuted in 1984.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A Very Brief Interlude:

2029 - ( _t_ )1

George Barnes had been born a Gloucester boy, and his father had been a fisherman, but George had had no desire to risk his life on the seas and so had fled to New York City the day he’d turned seventeen. 

Mostly, George had had little use for his children, but when the mood caught him, he could prove a consummate storyteller. On occasion, he’d relayed stories of men caught on the high seas in a gale, of gulls that screamed with the voices of dead sailors and of fantastical monsters in the depths of unimaginable darkness. Bucky still doesn't know if the stories were meant to entertain or to frighten. Sometimes, during the summer storms that had rattled the foundations of their rickety tenement, George used to instruct Bucky to listen to the sound of the wind. A fisherman, George had informed him, can gauge the force of a storm just by the sound the wind makes as it rushes against the ship's rigging. 

New York City has been caught in the grip of hurricane-force winds almost since the quinjet had touched down yesterday, and it shows no signs of letting up. The sky had screamed raggedly for almost twenty hours, by Bucky’s count, eventually rising to an almost unbearably high pitch. He thinks that if he weren’t already half-crazed that it would have driven him mad. 

An hour or so ago, as dusk had fallen, the eldritch shriek had abruptly lowered to an unsettling, hollow moan. It reminds Bucky of a field hospital he’d visited once, during the War— that endless, groaning chorus of the slowly dying had haunted his dreams for days. Now, he pictures howling dead soldiers rising up from the depths of the seas, clawing their way to him. He presses his hands against his ears to block out the sound, but it feels like the deep tone is resonating throughout his entire body, making his arm vibrate with the sound.

First it’s a whine, and then a wail, and then a high screaming, like a woman’s shriek, his father had said. After that is a sound that sailors don’t want to hear.

Bucky stares out his window, watching detritus whip past. The City’s lights have long-since gone out, but he can see awful colors he has no name for flickering in the distance. For awhile, he'd found dark amusement watching the numbers on the electronic Doppler rise, but hours ago the screen had abruptly gone black. Strange had theorized that the anemometer had probably snapped right off of its moorings. Bucky wonders what would have happened, if their last mission hadn’t been successful—there’s no possible way the quinjet could take off in this weather, and there’s no assurance that the wind will ever let up, perhaps ever again. Clint and Gamora would have died for nothing.

The black irony doesn’t escape him; that those were the two that hadn’t made it. Clint had gone quick, at least, but Gamora had suffered. Bucky had tried to grab her, to pull her back onto the quinjet even though she’d already been flayed open, but when he’d caught hold of her leg and tugged she’d screamed and he’d seen then that her body was falling apart, and that if he tried again he’d be tearing her leg right out of its socket.

He couldn’t stop playing the moment over and over in his mind, yesterday, as he’d scrubbed his body raw in scalding hot water, trying to dig the remnants of blood from his skin. He’d left her there, alone.

He hasn’t seen hide nor hair of anyone for over twelve hours now, although he’s sure that FRIDAY has orders to watch him like a hawk. Shuri and Peter are probably still downstairs, working feverishly on the machine—with the quantum fluctuations going haywire, the tiniest mistake in calculation could end them all in the blink of an eye. 

Everyone else, as far as Bucky knows, has retreated to their own corners of the Tower to wait out another sleepless night. After all, there’s nothing left for them to do until the machine is ready. Carol had tried to convince them all to shelter in one of the Tower’s underground bunkers—undoubtedly the smart thing to do—but even she had sounded uncharacteristically half-hearted. 

Bucky thinks maybe they’re all feeling that sense of impending finality that seeps into the marrow of his bones. If New York is the eye of the maelstrom, as Strange had theorized years ago, Bucky can only imagine what’s happening at the relative edges of the universe. Perhaps this is it, the final push—maybe they really are the only ones left alive now, and everything else is lost inside the black, howling nothingness. 

Bucky fingers the gash on the side of his face, now a thick, ragged line. He’s not sure what the hell got into it—some kind of poison, by the feel—but eventually Wanda had forcibly knit his skin back together, and that seems to have worked, at least enough. He thinks that if he manages to sleep it might heal fully, but he knows he won’t be able to, not with this relentless baritone in his ears.

The televisions show only static, now. He’d had a stereo, but he’d destroyed it ripping his room apart in futile rage yesterday. He knows that he could always use the one in Clint’s room, but he can’t bring himself to go there—it would feel like walking into a tomb. 

He just wants the sound to _stop_.

“FRIDAY,” he calls hoarsely. He's on the verge of ripping off his ears. _Anything_ would be better than this.

_You know, you should really make up with FRIDAY. She can—_

“Can you—play something?” 

There’s a slight pause. And then, from somewhere overhead, Bucky hears the faint strains of Glenn Miller’s _Moonlight Serenade._

It feels, in some small way, like a benediction. 

All at once, the bowstring tension in his limbs collapses. He slides to the floor, his back against the bed, and closes his eyes. For just a small moment, he is only Bucky Barnes again—not the Winter Soldier, not the White Wolf, not even the buck sergeant with an unnaturally mean shot. Just a young man in a dance hall, his strong hands sure on the slim waist of a pretty girl and his whole life ahead of him.

When the song finishes, FRIDAY starts it up again, letting it echo softly through the Tower as the world crumbles around them both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much, everyone, for sticking with me! I think that we should now have three chapters left to go in Part 1, and I should have the next chapter up soon. I so appreciate all the lovely and thoughtful comments - come talk to me! :D
> 
> Historical Footnotes: 
> 
> All credit to Sebastian Junger’s _The Perfect Storm_ for the quote / depiction of how wind sounds during a storm. The actual quote is here: 
> 
> “A scream means the wind is around Force 9 on the Beaufort Scale, forty or fifty knots. Force 10 is a shriek. Force 11 is a moan. Over Force 11 is something fishermen don't want to hear.” 
> 
> Junger, Sebastian. 1997. The Perfect Storm: a true story of men against the sea. New York: Norton.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for sticking with me! I’m somewhat nervous about this chapter, and I'm going to have to ask you to trust me on this one. 
> 
> Warnings: A bit bleak. Some discussion of mental health issues and depression.

1987 – ( _t_ )5

For a long time, Steve couldn’t understand the world around him because he’d been displaced through time.

The bewilderment he sometimes feels now is a more natural thing; the inevitable reaction of a senior citizen to a world that seems to have been taken over by the young and ridiculous sometime during the night.

 _Malls_ are a thing, now. He doesn’t really remember them from the future, but it’s all anyone seems to talk about at work—designing the next big mall. Of course, Manhattan doesn’t really have standalone malls, but it feels like there’s a new one going up upstate every week. Steve actually drives out to the Galleria in White Plains and wanders around for an entire Saturday, trying to understand the sudden popularity of _shopping centers._

The Galleria is impossibly vibrant and teeming with humanity—everywhere Steve looks he sees neon colors and laughing teens. He’s not sure what the nineties were—will be—like, and he’s trying to soak up the sight of all of it: social interaction without screens, everyone making eye contact instead of bent over their cell phones. 

He wanders through an arcade. He hadn’t exactly had time for videogames in the future, but there’s something endearing about how enthralled these kids are with simple joysticks and one-dimensional graphics; in a decade or two, they’ll be gunning each-other down in photorealistic Technicolor. 

Later, he buys a tabloid magazine just for something to do and sits in the food court, sipping Tab (which he enjoys but doesn’t ever remember drinking in the future—hopefully it sticks around). A huge close-up of Tom Cruise graces the magazine’s front-cover. He’d shot to fame after last year’s _Top Gun_ , and he sounds familiar enough that Steve is pretty sure his career will stay white-hot for some time.

Steve skims through a fawning interview with Duran Duran before stopping short. The following article’s headline skeptically barks, “THE NEXT GENERATION?” over a photograph of a clearly-drunk Tony Stark stumbling out of a Manhattan nightclub, his arm around a woman who might be a model. Steve’s fairly sure that Tony’s isn’t even old enough to legally drink yet. His face is narrow and baby-cheeked, which renders his drunken squint and bleary smile all the more grotesque.

It’s not the first tabloid photo Steve’s seen of Tony. According to Peggy, the Starks senior are simultaneously proud of and exhausted by Tony. He’s known to the public both for being a prodigy determined to outshine his father and a playboy son of privilege, prone to one scandal after another even at his young age. He’d received an early acceptance to MIT, which he nearly jeopardized by complications of his burgeoning cocaine problem. Steve’s presence, apparently, hasn’t made Howard any less of a deadbeat (or a functioning alcoholic), although Peggy loyally hasn’t said as much—it’s in all the things she doesn’t say, more than anything. 

Watching Tony grow up from a distance hurts, more than Steve had ever expected. True, he’s technically been much closer to Howard than he ever was with Tony, but he and Tony had achieved a sort of wartime intimacy that can’t really be compared to the casual, domestic relationship that Steve McCauley had once enjoyed with his wife’s coworker. 

Steve stares at the tabloid page. He can barely see the Tony Stark he knows in the picture; Tony’s hair is short, his frame rail-thin, and his face clean-shaven. Steve’s surprised at how much he suddenly misses him. After all, they hadn’t really been friends—at least, not the way Steve was with Sam, or even Nat. Steve and Tony clashed from the onset, but there was always something about Tony that was undeniably magnetic, a madcap charisma that Steve himself sometimes secretly envied. Whenever they’d interacted, Tony had seemed to enjoy keeping him off balance with a steady barrage of quips and barbs of varying intensity. Except for the few weeks they’d all spent chasing the scepter, Steve really hadn’t spent much time around Tony, even during the few years he’d lived at the facility—during that time, Tony had mostly lived in Malibu, and then at the Eco-Compound with Pepper and Morgan. 

Steve imagines that he’ll miss Tony even more once he publicly becomes Iron Man. Sometimes, when he looks at Howard, Steve thinks about the last time he’d seen Tony, slumped on the battlefield after that final Snap. He’d still been moving, but the light behind his eyes had already been burned right out of him. Steve remembers wishing, afterwards, that they’d had more time, but it was different, then—it was Steve who had held out the olive branch soon after Siberia, and Tony who'd been unwilling to take it until just before the end.

This time, Steve had been the one reluctant to accept Howard’s myriad apologies, which have been mostly implied and frequently ostentatious. Much like his son, Howard harbors both an aversion to swallowing his pride and a tendency to hurl money at his problems. A few years ago, Howard had made a big fuss in the press about pouring money into the new Smithsonian exhibit showcasing the Howling Commandos. “It’s a gesture,” Peggy had told Steve pointedly when she’d showed him the newspaper article. He’d read Howard’s glowing quotes about honoring the “Captain America legacy” with mixed feelings, and it had still been a few months before he’d relented enough to make a stiff rapprochement, and then mostly for Peggy’s sake, at least at first.

The icy civility between them has since thawed, somewhat, and not least because Steve recognizes the irony of his situation. He’s always been aware that he’s a convenient target of blame for Howard’s misplaced anger, just the way Tony had projected his own guilt onto Steve. Steve had never had to guess where Tony’s resentment had come from—Tony had always wielded his pain like a cudgel, and he’d been quick to remind Steve of his own inadvertent contribution to that sense of bitterness.

_You two knew each other? He never mentioned that. Maybe only a thousand times._

Howard may be given to similar doubts and self-destructive tendencies, but he is not nearly as intemperate as his son. He is far more measured—more calculating, maybe. Tony had lashed out compulsively, and Howard with deliberation; he’s not prone to the same kind of irrational impulse as his son. Ironically, Steve thinks that perhaps that’s why he’d been so quick to forgive Tony, but had harbored an uncharacteristic grudge towards Howard.

As long as he’s being honest with himself, Steve can admit that Howard’s words over the years had always cut him doubly close due to Steve’s own sense of guilt.

It’s possible, Steve thinks, that Howard’s destiny may be subtly different, in this timeline. Last year, Daniel Sousa had been hospitalized after a car accident just after his retirement, and Steve had been surprised and saddened to learn that Daniel had never married. Inevitably, Steve had wondered what else he’d inadvertently changed in this world—whom he’d saved or doomed with his choice to stay.

So far, Steve’s vigilance seems to have kept the timeline more or less intact, but if anyone’s fate is different, it’ll likely be that of the only person besides Peggy who knows that Steve used to be Captain America, once upon a time. 

1989 – ( _t_ )5

Lately, Steve’s been thinking about death.

Oh, not all the time—he’s not depressed, or anything. It’s just that it’s been a particularly bad month for him. 

John Fitzsimmons had died suddenly a few weeks ago of a heart attack. Stella had called to let him know, her already wispy voice tremulous as a leaf. He’d attended the funeral and had been shocked to see so many of his old friends so _aged_. Thomas and Evelyn had both been there, but not together—the former, once dashing, now bloated and balding, the latter ahead of the curve with a tight Botox-ed forehead and grotesquely swollen lips. Stella herself was clearly losing the battle to keep her gray hairs at bay, and even the baby-faced Andy Green looked somehow withered.

Know that he must appear unusually young-looking to them, Steve had kept to the back of the church and given his condolences only to Stella, who was too medicated to notice anything amiss. 

Afterward, he’d sat alone and taken stock of himself. He may not look old, but he is old. He’s been feeling more and more tired, lately, something he’s just not used to anymore. Of course, “tired” is relative, for him—he now needs at least seven hours of sleep instead of four, but he thinks that he could still run for a good hour without serious fatigue. Still, he theorizes that once the serum starts to break down, it must necessarily go at an exponentially faster rate, and suddenly he’s just not looking forward to aging. For the first time in almost forty years, his reliably steady hand had slipped, and he’d ruined a good schematic he’d been working on. After over a century of perfect health, it’s downright unnerving.

Lately, he can’t help but wonder if the serum breaking down will reverse all the effects it’s had on him. Will he shrink? Re-develop asthma? 

More than the physical effects are the psychological changes he can’t ignore. His weariness transcends the corporeal to touch his soul, and it’s a different kind of fatigue than he’d experienced in the Future. He’d thought he’d been prepared to ride out the ages with Peggy, and some of it had been wonderful, but that gossamer, intangible feeling of discovery and wonder seems to have slipped through his grasp. Now he feels like time has abruptly sped up, hurtling him along towards 2011. 

And then, on Thursday, the Berlin wall had fallen. 

It’s cause for celebration, of course—the papers are calling it the death knell of the Cold War. The looming threat of nuclear war that’s hung over the country for the better part of the past three decades like a choking black fog is finally lifting. Peggy’s over the moon, and starting to talk about a victorious retirement.

Steve wants to be happy, too. He’d known about the Berlin Wall, of course, and he’s waited impatiently through the horrific images of starvation and oppression in the Eastern Bloc for this day, but—

The Cold War ending is just another warning that his days are growing shorter. Steve Rogers will reawaken in little over two decades, and Steve McCauley will be right back to the beginning. Again. He fears that instead of being satisfied with a life well-lived, he’ll feel that same aching nostalgia all over again—that he’ll look around the erratic, flashing screens of Times Square and think about what’s forever lost to him, this time for good. Heedless, the Future is barreling toward him at an ever-increasing pace. Inexorable. 

1991 – ( _t_ )5

 _Smells Like Teen Spirit_ has got to be the worst song Steve’s ever heard, and he can’t escape it. He’d given up trying to follow popular music in the eighties, but grunge is so much worse. Sometimes, though, he thinks it’s somewhat appropriate given the malaise that seems to have fallen over the world these past few years. The luster of bright, glossy entertainment has worn off in favor of gritty realism and the scales have fallen from everyone’s eyes, awaking them to the angry realization that the world is both unfair and pointless. Big hair and hedonism are out; flannel and existential angst are all the rage. 

The ringing phone awakens Steve and Peggy at three in the morning. 

“Peggy McCauley,” she rasps wearily, and Steve rubs at his eyes. The Berlin Wall is down, the Cold War over—he can’t imagine what kind of international crisis SHIELD could possibly be calling about now. Peggy’s really just a figurehead, these days, anyway, not a frontlines girl anymore, so he doesn’t—

“ _What?_ ” 

Steve jolts into alertness when he hears her voice change from groggy to sharp in an instant. 

“When did—”

He sits up and sees that her back is frozen in a rigid line.

“Of course,” she says. “…yes. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

She hangs up, slowly, still facing away from Steve. He puts a hand on her shoulder, and she shrugs him off, almost violently.

“Pegs. Talk to me. What’s going on?”

“Did you know?” she whispers, and Steve wracks his brain frantically. What day is it, again? It’s almost Christmas—it’s—

He lets his hand fall slowly back into his lap. It’s December 16th, 1991.

_Don’t bullshit me, Rogers. Did you know?_

In an echo of what he’ll tell Howard’s son thirty years from now, he draws a breath. 

“Yes,” he tells her, gently. “Yes.”

Peggy carefully climbs out of bed, still not looking at him. 

“They say that it’s an accident,” she says rigidly, her face set like stone. “That Howard lost control of his vehicle and hit a tree. Is that what happened, Steve?”

And for the first time in his life, Steve lies to her. He doesn’t even hesitate. “Yes.”

She nods once, shortly. “I’m needed there now. I’ll be back when—when it’s done.”

She dresses silently, in the dark. Steve understands that she doesn’t want his reassurances now. She leaves without saying anything further, and Steve sinks back into the pillows. He stares at the ceiling until dawn breaks, and tries not to think of anything at all.

When he hears the old grandfather clock strike nine, he climbs out of bed. There’s something he’s been putting off for years now, in anticipation of the pain that it will bring him. Now’s as good a time as any for self-flagellation.

He leaves a note for Peggy in case she returns before him, although he doubts that she will, and then he buys a train ticket to Washington, D.C., to face what he’s been carefully compartmentalizing all these years.

It's Bucky's face, staring out at him from the glass. It's just as excruciating seeing it today, brand-new, as it was seeing it in 2014. 

_Inseparable Since Childhood._

Except they weren't, in the end. 

Steve sits in the museum for hours, replaying the indelible scene in his head.

The quick flash of a metal arm. The screech of tires. 

Bucky mercilessly crushing Maria Stark’s throat beneath his hand.

His dead, patient eyes.

Steve sits on one of the little benches scattered about the exhibit and watches the crowd mill about, feeling far away. The closer they’d gotten to 1991, he more he’d tried to simply put it out of his mind. In his timeline, the Winter Soldier had been activated because Howard had finally managed to recreate the super-soldier serum, and had intercepted him en route to the Pentagon. The odds were against Howard finding success a “second” time, let alone his leaving for the Pentagon on the very same night of December 16th.

_Don’t bullshit me, Rogers. Did you know?_

Or maybe that’s just what he’d told himself.

In his former life, he’d watched a black-and-white video of Peggy in this museum, talking about her experience with Captain America. She’d declined to participate in the exhibit in this timeline, for obvious reasons, but there’s no footage playing anywhere, anyway. Despite Howard’s efforts, the exhibit is somewhat smaller than the one in Steve’s timeline, maybe because Captain America fervor had never reached quite the same heights—here, the Howling Commandos share space with the 101st Airborne.

But there’s still that larger-than-life glass imposition of Bucky, staring out at the world with eyes that had already seen horror. There’s still that same voiceover that informs him that Bucky is “the only Howling Commando to give his life in service to his country”. 

If only that had been true.

How much kinder that might have been.

Steve knows that the display had been Howard’s doing. An olive branch, Peggy had informed Steve, and Steve had been too caught up in righteous indignation to take it, at least at first.

He’s lost so much time.

* * *

Steve returns home.

Peggy is waiting for him in the chair by the window. The dim light casts shadows on the lines of her face, making them harsher. For a moment, he sees Peggy as she will be: an old woman dying in her bed.

She looks at him, and in her eyes he sees contempt. “You could have stopped it,” is all she says. 

He can’t tell her that there was nothing he—or anyone else—could have ever done; that even if Howard hadn’t gotten into that car on December 16th, 1991, there was never any stopping this. 

_He’s a ghost._

Bucky would have killed anyone in his way. 

_You’ll never find him._

It doesn’t ease the guilt Steve feels when Peggy stalks by him and up the stairs, as dignified as she can on now-arthritic knees. He sleeps on the couch that night. Peggy would never deny him her bed, but he doesn’t feel that he deserves it.

He sees the Winter Soldier in every shadowed corner. He doesn’t sleep.

* * *

Tony is at the funeral, of course, wearing a wrinkled suit and a drinker’s flush. Steve can’t take his eyes off of him. 

Peggy gives the eulogy, her voice mostly steady, but Steve barely hears her words. Tony looks unbearably young, but the pain and anger etched on his face is still achingly familiar. 

_I don’t care. He killed my mom._

It’s closed-casket, and Steve knows exactly why. It’s not because Howard drunkenly crashed his car, mangling his body like this congregation believes. It’s because Steve’s old war buddy bashed Howard’s face in.

_I don’t know if I’m worth all this, Steve._

Steve remembers the rage in Tony’s eyes, the way he’d blanched with betrayal when Steve had finally told him the truth. Of course, he hadn’t been explicitly _told_ , not really, but the flashes Zola had shown him had presented an unmistakable implication.

Steve watches now as Tony’s young face twists in misery. Steve knows that this—his parents’ death—will be the final push that sends him down a dark spiral of drugs, girls, and self-loathing that will span the better part of two decades.

It’s not as though Steve hadn’t thought about trying to stop it. A dozen times, a hundred—how could he sit across the table from Howard Stark, trading jokes and clinking glasses, and not have wanted to? At first, he hadn’t been sure of exactly what he was going to do in this new reality; although he’d never planned on changing much, the possibility was still tangible. He’d known the date—he’d known exactly where. He could have saved Howard, saved Tony, saved _Bucky_ —all in one fell swoop. 

At times, he’d half convinced himself that he’d changed enough to alter Howard’s fate, anyway—after all, he’d married Peggy, hadn’t he? Daniel Sousa had remained a lifelong bachelor, and the lives of every SHIELD agent—including Howard—were accordingly irrevocably altered to varying degrees. Steve had virtually convinced himself that it was more likely that HYDRA would pull the lever somewhere further—or sooner—down the line, and he’d mentally prepared himself for an unexplained assassination, or a frame-job of whatever leftover terrorist group might seem handy. 

Steve watches Tony’s young jaw clench as Peggy talks about his parents’ devotion to their child. 

_Stay down. Final warning._

Steve had been sure that Tony would kill him, then. Just for a moment, as he’d balanced on the edge of a parapet, hearing the familiar whine of Iron Man’s repulsors firing up. _He’s really going to do it_ , he’d thought, almost astonished that he’d go out here, at the hands of Tony Stark.

And then Bucky had interfered, as he’d done a hundred times before. 

That sickening thud when Tony had turned around and kicked Bucky in the head is really the last thing Steve remembers from the fight. Then, there’d been nothing but white-hot rage until he’d slammed that shield into Tony’s chest. 

Abruptly, Tony lurches up from the pew and stalks unsteadily out of the church. Peggy’s voice falters just for a moment as half the congregation twists to watch Tony’s exit. There’s nothing that Steve or anyone else can do for Tony now—the only way out is through.

Peggy locks eyes with Steve as she steps carefully down from the pulpit, and he knows that as long as he lives, he will never forget the look on her face.

1994 – ( _t_ )5

Richard Nixon dies on an unusually warm Friday in April, but Peggy first learns of it on Saturday morning whilst eating her daily marmalade toast and scrambled eggs. Although Nixon’s death is apparently perfectly natural—stroke, the papers are saying—and he hasn’t been a player since his resignation over twenty years ago, it’s still something of a shock to find out by simply by reading the daily paper alongside the rest of the population, instead of by urgent phone call in the middle of the night.

Peggy had always thought that she’d feel restless and obsolete in retirement, but so far, it’s been oddly freeing. She reads Nixon’s long obituary on the front page of the New York Times and thinks back to those long, sleepless nights at the height of the Cold War. She hadn’t really been involved in Watergate, herself, although they’d done a cursory investigation into the identity of Deep Throat—the whole affair had seemed like an exasperating addendum to Russian mind-control experiments and the darker, proxy war being fought alongside in the shadows of Vietnam. Biochemical weapons and psy-ops and rogue Special Forces operators had occupied her mind for almost a decade, and she can’t say that she misses it—at least not now.

Perhaps it’s because she’s retired, and is no longer inundated daily with the horrors and intricacies of world politics, but the world seems lighter—almost frivolous—to her these days. It seems to her that the public no longer concerns itself with serious affairs but is content to simply entertain itself. The President allows himself to be interviewed on MTV. Disneyland opens in Europe, and McDonalds arrives in China. And then for almost two full months, earlier this year, the eyes of the world had been fixed with riveted attention on a brimming catfight between two _figure skaters_ , of all ridiculous things. The twenty-four hour news cycle had breathlessly reported every tiny update on the soapy drama—and it had been _all_ of them, respected outlets and tabloids alike. MSNBC and the New York Times right alongside the National Enquirer. She’d been initially disgusted by the relentless triviality of it all— _panem et circenses_ , indeed—but in the end, she and Steve had both been ready and waiting in front of the television set on the night of the short-program.

More than that—for the first time in her life, both she and the world seem to have found themselves without a weighty cause to worry at. Unrest in far away places like the Balkans or Bombay is just fodder for another column alongside the latest restaurant review. Every day, it seems, Russia and the United States agree to another reduction of their arsenals. Gas prices have dropped, and so has violent crime in New York, to an astonishing degree.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing, she thinks, a country so safe it teeters on the edge of superficiality. Is it because of her? Did she—and SHIELD—really guide them to this point, steering them away from the brink of disaster countless times, as it had seemed to them? Or would the teleology of the twentieth century have always led the country here, to this oasis of superficial concerns and frivolous news cycles, all wars and strife sequestered safely overseas? 

She hears a door creak open upstairs. Heavy footsteps pad down the hall to the washroom. 

For months after Howard’s death, she hadn’t been sure if their marriage would survive. Every time she looked at Steve, she questioned how he could have known about it the entire time and never breathed a word. 

In her darkest, most traitorous moments, she couldn’t help but wonder—had Steve consoled himself with this, those times when Howard had sent scathing words at him? They’d never really reconciled, not fully, but surely Steve wouldn’t deliberately hold this knowledge back as recompense for some imagined slight? 

Steve had finally confessed to her that he’d known the date, and how it would happen. A car accident, with Howard behind the wheel. He’d told her that he’d simply thought the odds of this small thing occurring again—of everything aligning just so—must be infinitesimal. 

“ _I’d already changed so much_ ,” he’d told her hoarsely, his hands trembling. 

Thinking clearly now, with the rawness of the thing somewhat faded, she can admit that he was likely right. In the world that Steve had left behind, she’d married another man, and the entire course of history must have changed, at least for her. Steve had admitted, long ago, that she and Howard had worked together to found SHIELD in his world, as well. She knows that she and Howard still would have been close, of course, but so many other things would have been different. Maybe Howard wouldn’t have cared for her husband, or maybe he would have liked him much more than he’d liked Steve. A thousand, tiny, disparate moments would have created dozens of different scenarios, and she imagines that the odds of Howard’s demise being so similar in both worlds is less likely than not.

In fact, the farther she gets from her initial rage, the more she thinks that perhaps Steve doesn’t share any of the blame in this matter.

Steve had always been so careful not to tell her anything about important “historical” events, on the occasion he would have been able to. They’d discussed civil rights and geopolitical happenings, of course, but in retrospect, on matters of national security, he’d always deferred to her thoughts and opinions, so careful not to steer her in any one direction.

Some things—the Cuban Missile Crisis, the JFK assassination, the Vietnam War—would have played out exactly the same. 

Some things—COINTELPRO, Operation CHAOS, MKULTRA—Steve hadn’t even known about.

She thinks back to every time she’d bitten her tongue when she’d seen Howard with a glass in his hand before noon. She thinks back to every night she’d held her breath watching Howard drive away from Lehigh; to every occasion she’d set her own agents on him, to ensure that he’d have to call Jarvis or even a cab to take him home.

She should have pushed Howard into getting help, or at least impressed upon him the dangers of what he was doing. Instead, she’d laughed it all off with the rest of them—written off the most dangerous facet of his personality as a silly affectation to avoid any more difficult conversations. She’d always known that he was simply coping with the choices they’d both had to make, and she herself had been too exhausted to do what she should have been doing all along. 

She’s as much to blame as Steve is. 

Steve clumps slowly down the steps, blinking at her when he reaches the landing.

Then he smiles drowsily, his face still creased with sleep, and another fragment of her waning resentment crumbles away into nothingness.

2001 – ( _t_ )5

When it happens, Peggy doesn’t speak to him for almost a week.

2005 – ( _t_ )5

Though she’ll one day die an American hero, Peggy has always maintained her dual-citizenship for purposes equally political, practical, and sentimental. To Steve, she never seems more quintessentially British than when she shows interest in the Royal Family, which he’s gathered to be something of a point of simultaneous disparagement and pride for her. In the eighties and nineties, she’d avidly followed the (sometimes literal) affairs of Charles and Diana, never missing a sally in their raging media battle. 

Still, he was surprised to find her glued to the television set for the marriage of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles. Despite her enduring loyalty to the Crown, she’d been firmly in Diana’s camp during the messy divorce saga, and she’d seemed deeply disturbed by the Princess’s untimely death and the sobering sight of her two young sons slowly trailing after her coffin. 

Peggy’s final take on it all catches him off-guard. She’d taken such pleasure upbraiding Camilla—“that unimaginable trollop”—that he assumed she’d be righteously indignant at the ultimate outcome of their sordid affair.

Instead, she’d seemed mostly wistful. “Even after everything, they still love each other enough to risk the whole world laughing at them,” she’d said. “It’s almost sweet, really.”

Even after everything.

They still have their bad days, of course, and they likely always will. In 1948, Steve couldn’t have pictured a rough patch in their marriage, let alone have believed that so much distrust and hurt would have built up between them over the years. Of course, they were both different people then—it’s been almost sixty years, after all. 

Steve has long-since accepted that he’d harbored an idealized view of not only Peggy, but of their relationship. Part of the problem was that he’d never had a long-term relationship before Peggy, and he’d been painfully naïve to the myriad inherent complications and complexities therein. He hadn’t really deliberated much about his potential limitations before jumping headfirst into the past but then, he’d never exactly been risk-averse. One doesn’t become a bona fide superhero by carefully weighing the odds, after all. 

In those halcyon early days, almost everything had simply fallen into place just as he’d imagined it, and he’d foolishly expected it to always be that easy. In the meantime, he’d held her to an impossible standard— projecting on her his own sense of morality while never considering that she might begin to chafe against his own reticence and passivity. 

_Don’t you ever miss it? Being Captain America?_

In some ways, they’ve both failed to live up to the other’s expectations.

The tension between them had eased considerably after Peggy had retired—without the weight of the world on her shoulders, Peggy seems considerably lighter. More than that, now that she’s just a civilian again, Steve feels more comfortable slipping her little tidbits of information. He’s assured her that he really doesn’t know much about this time period, and that’s true—he’d spent more time trying to catch up on the big beats of the twentieth century—but he knows enough that he can sometimes surprise her. The future seems more like delightful conspiracy between them, now, and less like a dark secret he’s keeping from her. 

More than once, he wonders what their lives would have been like if they’d adopted a child after all, or if Peggy hadn’t been quite so ambitious. 

Just because it’s a beautiful sunny day, they’ve decided to drive all the way out to The Pond in Central Park. They sit on a bench near the water in comfortable silence, watching the ducks drifting lazily. Peggy slips her warm hand into his, linking their fingers together. Her delicate skin is dotted with age-spots, but her nails are still impeccably painted. Across the water, Steve can faintly see a beautifully dressed young couple posing for pictures. Engagement photos, maybe.

She looks at him and smiles, her eyes still bright after all these years. “We’ve had a good run, haven’t we?”

He kisses the top of her graying head.

Peggy falls asleep on the drive home, her head resting against the car window. When they pull into the driveway, she jerks awake. Steve watches her fondly for a moment as she rubs her eyes, looking sleepy and bemused.

“Steve,” she says suddenly, still sounding groggy, “Remind me to call Howard back, before the day’s end—something about dinner reservations, I think.”

2008 – ( _t_ )5

Steve had passed the SHIELD along to Sam almost a full year ago, before Peggy had started really declining. It had been a beautiful end to a wonderful day, and after watching her drift off to sleep he’d awkwardly knelt at the foot of the bed, his knees creaking alarmingly. Under the bed was a lockbox that he hadn’t opened in over twenty years. The metal wristband contained within had worked just as well as the day he’d first put it on, the faithful hum of electricity as he pressed his fingers to it a tribute to its peerless maker. He’d felt it then, in his bones—the time had been right.

Everything had seemed so peaceful to him, sitting on that bench. He’d felt content with the way everything had turned out—even if, in the end, it hadn’t been perfect. Even if at times it had been truly painful. He’d understood, by then, that such moments are inevitable—necessary, even, to put the beauty of a full life lived into perspective.

Seeing Sam again hadn’t felt shocking or shameful, as he’d once feared it might. Instead, it had felt like slipping right back into a familiar dream; the rhythm between them easy, the gentle banter familiar. Most of all, it had been a satisfying conclusion to that last, incomplete chapter of his life; handing off the shield had felt like closing a loop inside his mind and finally putting his nagging ghosts to rest.

It hadn’t even hurt, much, that Bucky had turned and walked away. Steve can never understand what Bucky might have been feeling, in that moment, but Bucky has had enough jarring change forced upon him to last several lifetimes. 

_Allow Barnes the dignity of his choice._

Besides, Bucky had already known what Steve would do; they’d already made their peace with each other, that last night. In Steve’s heart, he knows that Bucky had not begrudged Steve his happy ending—Steve does not now begrudge Bucky the desire to preserve Steve Rogers in his memory the way he’d always known him. After all, in some ways, Steve McCauley is a very different man from Steve Rogers, and Bucky—no stranger to the profound changes enough time can wreak on a soul—must also know that to be true. 

In his heart, too, Steve had been relieved that he hadn’t had to face Bucky one last time—that he’d never have to make that final, bittersweet good-bye. He and Bucky have parted from each other more times than he can count, but perhaps there will never need to be a final farewell between them. Steve doesn’t really believe in God anymore, but perhaps, in some other place, he’ll be reunited with Bucky again.

Stranger things have happened to them both, after all.

Then, after watching the sun set for the last time in a place that was once his world, Steve had returned home, to slip into bed beside his wife.

He’s since learned that happy endings that go on longer than they’re supposed to turn bitter. 

Fast. 

The majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Steve now counts himself among them, and for the first time he admits that he is unhappy.

Most of this is due to the fact that Peggy can no longer comfortably walk up and down the stairs, and Steve knows that their time living together is limited. Steve’s nights are sleepless and filled with dread; every time Peggy pauses her speech, he holds his breath. If it weren’t for Steve, she would have certainly gone into assisted living years ago. As it is, he struggles to lift her, the serum clearly almost run its course. 

The worst days are when she forgets that Howard is dead. It’s infrequent enough—for now—but every time she remembers, it’s like some small part of her re-lives Steve’s betrayal all over again. 

Sometimes he’s relieved, knowing that she’ll die before ever finding out that Bucky was the one who did it, although it’s not as though Bucky ever comes up these days. Among other things, Peggy would likely have felt bitterly vindicated for what she once admitted to being a somewhat irrational distaste. Sometimes, Steve thinks that perhaps part of it was resentment towards Bucky for dying young; to _her_ knowledge, he’s forever pristine in Steve’s memory, untouched by age or disillusionment. 

Steve’s friends are old now, too, and dying. Some of them don’t live on their own, anymore, and if Steve wants to visit, he has to go and see them in their respective nursing homes. Some of the assisted living facilities aren’t so bad, but most of them are awful. Don Harris went into a Medicaid-sponsored home after his stroke and spends his days crammed into a tiny dorm that looks like a hospital room and smells like piss. Thomas Gordon is still around, too, and he’s in a statelier—and much more expensive—facility mocked up like a series of tiny apartments. When Steve goes to visit him, he passes a long line of residents who have left their rooms early to wait for whatever meal will be served next. Their families don’t visit. They have nothing much else to do.

Will this happen over and over again? Will the Steve Rogers that comes out of the ice here wield the hammer, save the world, and then create another timeline, one where he grows old with the new Peggy he creates for himself? Will that Steve end up here, too, wrestling with the same existential crises? 

He tries seeing a therapist. She comes highly recommended by one of Peggy’s doctors, and in the therapist’s sharp eyes and firm handshake he might once have seen something of Maria Hill, but now all he thinks when he looks at her is, _you’re so young_. She chatters at him in a strange blend of soothing tones and New York lockjaw and he wonders whether she’ll disappear into dust a decade from now. 

The moment he tells her his age, some kind of switch is permanently flipped in her mind, and from then on she invariably treats him with the same sweet condescension that Steve’s witnessed from Peggy’s nurse. Like he’s a doddering old man on the edge of senility. 

Like his wife.

He’s lived for almost two centuries. He’s lived two lives and he can’t tell her anything about one of them. He can’t explain his nightmares of killer robots and shrieking eldritch aliens, of men burnt up inside or turning into monsters. After three sessions, he gives it up as useless. 

He walks aimlessly around Central Park and thinks, _this is how it ends_. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. He doesn’t go down in a blaze of glory—he sputters out, inconsequentially, leaving no-one behind to mourn him.

The funny thing is that if he’d never become Captain America—if he’d never left Brooklyn—this is probably how he would have died all along.

He doesn’t sleep. He can’t. His body aches in a way that’s both shocking and painfully familiar; in every position, his spine feels twisted. Worse still are the nightmares he can’t stave off—eldritch horrors that he is now too frail to fight. 

In the night, old enemies become larger than life foes who take advantage of his weakened state. He’s terrified, fragile, helpless—a faceless, ordinary civilian— collateral damage in a land of gods and monsters, crushed beneath the heel of stronger beings. 

Loki.

Ultron.

Bucky.

2009 – ( _t_ )5

Every morning, Steve reads the paper cover to cover and closely scrutinizes each likely-looking article, even though he suspect what he’s looking for will be easily spotted.

The capture and rescue of America’s preeminent defense contractor should be headline news, but the _Times_ only reports on Tony Stark’s obscene wealth and various celebrity trysts. 

Steve tells himself that he’s worrying over nothing. Stane will still try to take over Stark Industries, and Tony will still become Iron Man, one way or another. As long as it happens before 2012, everything will be fine.

2010 - ( _t_ )5

It won’t be long now, or so he hopes. It can’t be.

Most of his friends are dead. The last Howling Commando, Jim Morita, died five months ago, his passing barely a mention in the back pages. 

Peggy’s decline had been sudden and alarmingly rapid. Steve cannot watch her every moment of the day, and so he’s moved her into a nursing home. The only easy part about it was already knowing exactly which one to contact.

It doesn’t matter if Peggy accidentally tells anyone that Steve is—was—Captain America now; nobody would believe her, and not just because she’s got dementia. 

As if in sympathy with his wife’s failing health, Steve’s serum has briskly broken down. For a man of almost two-hundred years he’s downright spry, but his back is bent and his breath is starting to take on a familiar rasp. 

His doctor tells him that he has depression (and also asthma). He refuses to take the prescribed pills that make him feel dead inside. It’s worse than the pain.

Time begins to run together for him, nightmarishly; the old became young became old again. On some days he wakes up coughing, his spine aching, and for a moment he’ll think he’s back in a Brooklyn tenement, but there’s no one here now to rub his back and whisper soothing words. The wheel of time has finally caught him in its spokes and he faces the end—only not, he fears, soon enough. He used to cherish the thought of growing old with Peggy, but the reality is to be caged alone in a failing body—just the way he was before. Steve dreads watching Captain America wake from the ice, young and vital the way he’ll never be again. Steve McCauley will hate and envy Steve Rogers for his strength, his unwavering sense of purpose, but mostly for all of the choices he has ahead, which he’ll inevitably get wrong. 

He can admit to himself now that his choice was a selfish one—and one that he ultimately regrets. He’s made Peggy’s life worse—he’s denied her the chance at the relationship she deserved, with someone who could give all of himself to her, holding nothing back. He’s forced her to grow old alone for so many years; to humiliate herself by wrinkling and aging alongside a man who’d looked increasingly like her son. 

_Good becomes great. Bad becomes worse._

He feels bitter and helpless, the way he’d used to, a long time ago. The prickly defensiveness that had been gentled by the serum rises to the forefront of his personality, heightened by a sense of vulnerability both new and painfully familiar. He wants to lash out at the world but has to settle for snapping righteously at the young cashier who tries to overcharge him.

He estimates that he’ll be alive for at least another ten years. His body may have lost its former strength but his organs maintain an unusual resilience, likely because they’ve remained untouched by disease and the ravages of lifestyle for so long. If he’s not lucky enough to get caught in Chitauri crossfire, he’ll probably re-experience the Snap all over again. 

He’ll get to watch America turn on Steve Rogers, making him Public Enemy number one.

He’ll re-live Peggy’s death. He’ll watch Captain America carrying her coffin.

He’ll see footage of the U.N. being bombed on TV, and he’ll remember that he created a new Bucky just to force him to suffer endlessly all over again. 

If he’s lucky, he’ll watch himself crumble into dust.

He finds himself up nights, resenting Tony of all people. Tony had gone out a hero in his prime, surrounded by his loved ones. Steve had never contemplated his own death before but he always thought he’d go out much the same way: brightly burning out in favor of some great cause. This slow, decaying fade into inevitability is infinitely worse. 

During the day, he does nothing. His hands are too clumsy to create art the way he used to. He collects his pension and watches hours of mind-numbing television. He forces himself to eat. At night, he sometimes wishes for death, feeling weak and hating himself. He longs for it. Prays for the serum to finally break down entirely and end his misery. 

In his dreams, the Winter Soldier comes to him, beautiful and young and inexorable, and crushes Steve’s feeble throat beneath his merciful hand.

2018 – ( _t_ )1

“I went forward in time to view alternate futures. To see all the possible outcomes of the coming conflict.”

2016 – ( _t_ )1

“You think there will be no consequences, Strange? No price to pay? We broke our rules, just like her. The bill comes due. Always.”

2029 – ( _t_ )1

“It’s time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So – don’t hate me! This is what Steve wanted, after all. But I promised you Stucky in the tags. Eventually. 
> 
> [CaptainAmericaPatiencePSA]
> 
> I’ve had some experience with families dealing with dementia/Alzheimer’s, and it is heartbreaking to say the absolute least. I don’t think depression (especially since the serum breaking down would remove any neurological defenses of same) would be out of left field – honestly, Steve seemed like he was depressed during some of the actual movies, to me.
> 
> Also, I love Nirvana. But I don’t think that Steve would have!
> 
> Historical Footnotes!
> 
> Clinton went on MTV in 1992 and answered the infamous “boxers or briefs” question.
> 
> In 1994, Tonya Harding had rival figure skater Nancy Kerrigan attacked prior to the Winter Olympics (yeah, she was absolutely in on it. The Price of Gold >>> I, Tonya.) It was one of the first instances of the crazy 24 hour news stories (subsequently unseated by OJ Simpson).
> 
> Mumbai was still called Bombay until 1995.


	12. Chapter 12

1991 – ( _t_ )6

Steve returns home. 

Peggy is waiting for him in the chair by the window. The dim light illuminates the lines on her face, making them harsher, and for a moment he sees Peggy as she will be, an old woman dying in her bed.

She looks at him, and he immediately understands that somehow, she knows.

“You lied to me.” 

He’d had no idea that SHIELD—that _anyone_ except HYDRA—ever considered Howard’s death anything but an accident. He’d thought that even SHIELD wouldn’t have covered up the assassination of one of the wealthiest and most influential men in America, their founder no less. He’s not sure why they would have wanted to. 

_Don’t bullshit me, Rogers. Did you know?_

“Yes. I know it doesn’t change anything, but this is important. Later.”

She stiffens at the confirmation. “All these years—you could have stopped so much. And I never asked it of you. Kennedy, Vietnam—”

She looks away, fast, but Steve still catches the glitter of tears in her eyes. She hastily brushes them away before they can fall. 

“I’d always thought that if anything were going to happen to us, or to someone we loved, you would tell me. You must have already changed so much, just by _being here_ —I thought surely you wouldn’t put this damnable _future_ before the _lives_ of—”

She stops, and takes a deep breath. “And I asked you.” Her thin voice quavers, and Steve hears Peggy in her hospital bed. 

_I’ve grown so old without you._

“ _Howard’s killer_ , Steve—and I can’t even— _twice_ , I asked you, _twice_ I asked about the Winter Soldier, and—”

Steve’s heart stops, and so does Peggy at the look on his face.

“’The Winter Soldier?’” he repeats, stunned. 

_Most of the intelligence community doesn’t believe he exists._

He’d always known that SHIELD had had some awareness of the Winter Soldier’s existence, but Natasha had lead him to believe that it was mostly considered a wild theory amongst the wider intelligence community; a boogeyman assassin from the grassy knoll. 

She’d had no reason to lie.

 _The ones that do call him the Winter Soldier._

“Don’t even bother denying it now.” 

_He’s a ghost._

“We’ve already recovered the footage.”

_You’ll never find him._

“Footage?”

Steve’s blood turns to ice. This isn’t how it happens. HYDRA had carefully designed the Starks’ murder to appear as though Howard had lost control of the vehicle—an easy enough assumption, as Howard’s drinking problem was common knowledge at that time. No autopsy had been performed, both because the cause of death was ostensibly evident, and to preserve the dignity of an American hero.

“You didn’t know about that?” Peggy’s voice is like ice, but the hands that clutch her teacup are trembling slightly. “It’s all quite clear on the tape. I watched him—watched him kill Howard, and then—”

Her hands shake so violently that the teacup falls from her grip and shatters onto the floor, loud as a gunshot in the stillness of the house. 

Steve holds his breath. His heart beats so loud that he’s sure she can hear it.

She sits silently for a moment, collecting herself. “Nobody knows what to make of it, really, but we’re fairly certain that it’s him. There aren’t too many people out there with—with metal arms.”

Steve closes his eyes. Although his eidetic memory has long-since faded, he can still see that video clear as day. He can see Bucky’s blank face, mask-less, looking straight at the camera.

“Do they know—who he is?”

Peggy studies his face, and Steve knows that she’s trying to determine whether he himself knows the identity of the assassin. He tries to look as guileless as he can. 

“Not yet,” she answers finally. “We’re running facial recognition but nothing’s come up yet. I don’t know that it matters, though. We think that he may be some kind of an—enhanced individual. An attempt at a Soviet super-soldier, maybe.”

He wonders how they’d come to that conclusion. He doesn’t know what they’ve managed to amass through the years.

Is it possible that SHIELD _can_ connect the Winter Soldier to Bucky? It’s not like they’ll be running facial-recognition against a database of World War II casualties, and they don’t have any of his DNA on file, even if he’d left any behind.

Is DNA testing even a thing yet? Because if it—

“Steve.”

He knows that for the rest of his life, he’ll never forget the expression on her face. She doesn’t bother wiping the tears from her eyes now.

“Who is he?”

 _Your pal, your buddy, your_ Bucky. 

“You know. I know you know. I can see it in your face, Steve, you’re a terrible liar.”

_He was a drunken lout, hardly the saint you make him out to be in your memories, and if he’d survived the war it’s hardly likely you’d even remember him at this rate._

“He’s—” Steve hesitates. Peggy draws a harsh breath. 

He can’t tell her. She’s always resented the memory of Bucky for some elusive reason that he could never quite put his finger on. He knows with abject certainty that if he tells Peggy that Bucky is the one who killed Howard—that Steve had been lying to her all these years—she will hate him for the rest of her life.

He’ll have to explain to her exactly how he knows what he knows. He’ll have to tell her that the organization she’s built is—and always has been—infiltrated by HYDRA, and that he’d known it all along and let it happen anyway. He’d shaken the hand of the man who must have ordered Howard’s death, and he’d watched him walk away with Peggy on his arm. 

Her graying curls quiver as she stares at him, face set, bracing for the blow. She is as lovely as the day he’d first met her. He’d never dreamed, then, that he could have ever hurt her like this. 

Grimly, he makes his choice, and feels Steve Rogers slip away from him.

“He’s a ghost story. At least, as far as I knew. I had heard about him, yes. But in the future, most of the intelligence community doesn’t believe he exists.”

He hopes that hedging the truth will be more convincing, and he prays that she won’t recognize Bucky’s face. The footage had been grainy, and they’d only met once.

Peggy’s mouth trembles. 

“I didn’t know about this—about the footage, I mean. Peggy. _I didn’t know_.”

She sniffs, and wipes tears furiously from her cheeks, trying in vain to compose herself. When she finally looks at him, he sees contempt in her eyes. 

“You could have stopped it.”

He doesn’t follow her to bed. He knows that he won’t sleep. Instead, he sits on the couch in something like a state of shock. His mind races in a thousand directions, each more disturbing than the last. 

In 2016, Zemo had gone through a lot of trouble to get his hands on the footage of the Starks’ death. As far as Steve knows, he’d had to go all the way to Siberia to find it. Is it possible that SHIELD had recovered the footage in his timeline? While it’s entirely plausible that whatever HYDRA moles now ensconced in SHIELD could have eventually stolen the footage, how could Peggy not have immediately pulled on that thread, if she’d known about it all along? Why would SHIELD fail to investigate the murder of Howard Stark?

He recounts what Natasha had told him about the Winter Soldier. She’d believed in him only because she’d seen him with her own eyes, and she’d been just as blindsided by HYDRA’s infiltration as Steve had been. He’s sure of it. 

_Soviet slug. No rifling._

Steve has long-since accepted that he’s changed some things—for better or worse—but what could he have changed to have caused _this_? He doesn’t know the details of the Starks’ assassination beyond what he’d seen in Siberia—he knows only that HYDRA had taken the footage and kept it a secret so well guarded that dozens of men had had to die for Zemo to find it. Steve has to think that SHIELD would have noticed if that particular Zapruder film had gone missing.

Something is very wrong.

* * *

Peggy can’t stand to be in the same house as Steve and so she leaves again, heading back to Lehigh. 

When she’d arrived at headquarters the night before, she’d been greeted by Thompson and Joe Anderson, acting Deputy Chief in Pierce’s stead, both of them grim-faced.

“You need to see this,” Thompson had told her softly. 

She’d nearly looked away when the car had first plunged into frame. Thompson had gently placed a hand on her arm as Howard had tumbled out of the front seat. She’d felt sick, and angry, and hadn’t understood why they were showing her this until the motorcycle had swung into view, and the Winter Soldier had calmly dismounted.

As the metal of his arm came into view, her stomach had dropped. He’d sauntered up to the trunk first, his steps measured and his demeanor almost grotesquely casual. After lifting it and peering inside for a few moments, he’d casually rounded the car to where Howard crawled feebly.

He’d gripped Howard by the hair and wrenched his head back. For the smallest of moments, it looked as though they’d stared at each other, frozen. Then she’d exhaled weakly as the Winter Soldier had crushed his armored fist into Howard’s face— _once, twice._

The Soldier had carelessly dragged Howard back into the vehicle with what looked like monstrous strength—he hadn’t even needed a second hand to place Howard’s lifeless body in the front seat. The small, detached part of her mind assessing the details of the scene noted that she’d been right all along when she’d thought he might be a Soviet attempt at a super-soldier; his strength was clearly well beyond that of a normal man’s.

When Winter Soldier had finished with Tony and calmly started back around to the other side of the car, and she’d turned away.

“Shut it off,” she’d said. 

“Wait,” Thompson had said. 

“Now.”

“There’s audio,” Thompson said quietly. “From Maria, we think. Scratchy, but we’re trying to clean it up.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“You know we’ll need everything we can get on this. There’s a clear shot of his face, too, if you—”

“ _Shut it off_ , for God’s sake.”

Her voice had broken on the last syllable and she’d closed her eyes until she’d heard the mechanical click of the monitor switching off.

Silence had hung in the room, broken only by her own labored breathing. 

She’d struggled to steady her voice.

“Where is Pierce?”

“Still overseas. He knows about Howard, but not the Soldier, or the footage. We didn’t want to chance it on an unsecured line in case we can get the jump on them—he’ll be briefed on the flight.”

They’d looked at each other then, neither needing to voice the question on both of their minds. The wild rumors about the Winter Soldier have only in common that he is some kind of assassin, but whether KGB or a mercenary, he is only a hired gun. Who, then, is the _them_ that had aimed him? 

Before the sun had risen SHIELD headquarters had been fully staffed, senior agents brusque in their grief and younger agents buzzing importantly, each one bent to the task of ferreting out motive or murderer. Certain agents were preparing to interview Tony and Edwin Jarvis to determine where the Starks had been heading; forensics had already begun to attempt a detailed composite sketch of the Winter Soldier’s face. 

Originally, Peggy had intended to stay for as long as was necessary, but once the shock had worn off she’d realized that she had her own source to consult, and she’d returned home to confront her husband.

She’d left again early the next morning after a sleepless night alone. Steve was nowhere to be found as she marched out the front door, but she can’t focus on the wreckage of her marriage now. On the drive, she banishes all extraneous domestic thoughts from her mind so that she can bend herself to this gruesome task. 

Once deep in the bowels of Lehigh, she stares at the photo IT had hastily printed out for her. It’s horrendously blurry, as she’d expected from the security footage, but she can still make out certain features – a symmetrical face, a heavy brow. Out of focus though the photograph is, it inexplicably tugs at something deep in her memory. It might be that she’s only recalling sitting here with Howard, pouring over the clearest supposed photo of the Winter Soldier. Probably the memory—now horribly ironic—is why he seems almost familiar to her. Like an old enemy. 

They’ve set agents to analyzing all the old files that SHIELD’s resident conspiracy theorists had flagged. Whoever the Winter Soldier is, he’s an agent of _somebody_ , and there has to be some sort of pattern to his attacks that might point to an agenda. 

_Is it—what they think? A Soviet operative?_

Steve had assured her, back then, that it _wasn’t what they’d thought_ , and maybe he really had meant that as far as he’d known, the Soldier was simply a myth, but that seems like the sort of thing he might have conceded to her. Even if he’s lying to her _now_ , though, his assertion at that time might not have been an outright lie, but simply the closest he could have gotten to the truth without giving the game away entirely. 

Perhaps his denial had meant that the Winter Soldier isn’t working for the Soviet government. He might be working as a mercenary, not the KGB, or even for some splinter terrorist group. That doesn’t really track with the little they know of him, though—the unexplained or the gnawingly hinky assassinations half-seriously attributed to the Winter Soldier had almost always turned up Soviet slugs with no rifling, and they’re fairly sure that whoever he is, he’s been stationed somewhere on the other side of the Iron Curtain for some time. 

But for the last fifty years?

“Who are you, you bastard?”

She tries to will his features into sharp relief—tries to assemble shadows into a recognizable face. She only manages to come away with an impression of leashed darkness.

Again that nagging pull.

Steve, of course, hasn’t shed any light on the matter. Begrudgingly, she can admit that he’d looked genuinely shocked when she’d mentioned the footage, but he still hadn’t given her any real new information on the Winter Soldier.

 _A ghost story_ , Steve had said, but if that were true, Steve would have had no reason to turn white as a sheet at just the sound of the moniker. He’d given himself away that rainy night almost twenty years ago, and unfortunately for him she’d had the entire plane ride to Detroit to brood on his unexpected reaction.

He must have known that the Soldier would have been the one to kill Howard, and she shudders to think what would have happened if they hadn’t recovered the footage. The crime scene had been quite expertly staged to look like a crash. Everyone had known Howard’s reputation with alcohol.

No one would have questioned it.

Perhaps it’s still possible that Steve has told her the truth, as he knows it—maybe he really hadn’t known about the footage confirming the Winter Soldier’s existence. After all, except for those most prone to outlandish theories, most of SHIELD had thought the Winter Soldier a— _crock, Pegs, Soviet propaganda_ —tall tale, as well. Maybe they never catch the Winter Soldier, but the myth still survives into the future. Maybe they fail to solve this entirely and Howard’s death becomes just another conspiracy theory to be dredged up for some sensational TV documentary. 

“Peggy,” Thompson says, rapping gently on the doorframe.

She doesn’t look up from the photograph. “Yes.”

“They’ve cleaned up the imaging as much as they can. We’re going to go take another look now.”

She raises her head at the sound of the second voice, familiar and dearer to her. 

Daniel Sousa should not be on base—he’d retired years ago, just before his car accident, and this is as classified as it gets. His hair is silver and he’s in a wheelchair, now, and the thin steel of her resolve threatens to snap as she meets his sympathetic gaze.

She takes a breath, and steadies herself. “Are you authorized to be here?” she asks, aiming for a lighthearted note and missing by a wide mark. She forces a smile.

His answering smile is just as wan. “Well, I’m a rogue agent, now, but Thompson has agreed to cover for me.”

She tries to laugh but her breath hitches, just once, and both men carefully pretend not to notice. She thinks that if she hears a single word of pity she might break down entirely, and so she draws herself up and squares her shoulders.

“It’s good that you’re here, Daniel,” she says, and she makes her voice as businesslike as she can. “After we—we view the footage, we’ll need you down at analysis.”

By nature physically constrained, Daniel had turned himself into one of the finest intelligence analysts she’d ever known. She’s under no illusion that he’s here for any other reason than to provide her a shoulder to lean on, but in truth they really can use his help. 

Whoever had unleashed the Winter Soldier has to have been around for some time. Just like them.

Daniel just nods, his eyes soft, and Peggy turns deliberately away to face to Thompson. “Anything on the ground?”

Thompson shakes his head. “Nothing. We’ve put a few feelers out at Mossad and MI6, but we’re trying to keep this tight for now. We’re not seeing any expected movement out of the KGB we’ve got eyes on, though.”

Howard had made the decision not to expose several known KGB moles decades ago—the better to keep an eye on their movements. _Mushrooms_ , he’d called them, happily. _We feed ‘em shit and keep ‘em in the dark_. He’d opined that it would be better to simply watch the agents sloppy enough to have gotten made in the first place then to allow them to be replaced with better agents who might escape their gaze. _Let them waste their time spying on the FBI for all I care, they’ll be underestimating us for years._

Tears prick the corners of her eyes again as she hears his voice in her head, and she pushes her emotions ruthlessly down. The only thing that she can do for Howard now is to bring his killer to justice, and perhaps change the course of history.

“Alright. Let’s get to it.”

* * *

Steve hasn’t been to Brooklyn in years. There’s been no real reason to go, except to stoke his own sense of guilt, and even as Brooklyn becomes more and more distorted from the Brooklyn of his youth, the sight of once-familiar streets still sends shards of self-reproach through his chest. He wonders, sometimes, how he could have happily attended Pratt for so many years—perhaps back then, the brightness of oblivious contentment had simply washed out the creeping shadow of remorse.

Even now, hunched over on the train, he wonders why he’s doing this to himself. Visiting the Smithsonian had been his self-indulgent exercise in self-flagellation, and now he should be at home, waiting for Peggy. He should pacing the floor and constructing explanations and apologies, thinking about how to move forward and not deliberately exacerbating the source of his pain.

He might as well be back in 2013 again, listening to Billie Holiday in a fit of melancholy self-pity. 

Since Peggy’s revelation, he’s replayed the tape over and over in his head, trying to figure out what Peggy might glean from it. He himself hadn’t watched all of it—once he’d realized what they were looking at, he’d deliberately fixed his gaze on Tony, bracing for the inevitable explosion. Bucky’s face on the tape had been instantly recognizable to _him_ , but Steve had sketched that face a thousand times, and had seen it in his nightmares a thousand more. Peggy knows Bucky only as the comparatively clean-cut Sergeant Barnes, and it’s highly unlikely she’ll be able identify him by sight alone.

Besides, both he and Tony would have placed that metal arm immediately even if Bucky had been masked. He doesn’t think Peggy knows about that. 

He folds forward entirely, putting his face in his hands. It would have been better, he thinks, if he had tried to change things from the beginning, and damned the consequences to the future. Even if he’d managed to screw it all up, at least he wouldn’t be living with this shame. Of what he’d done to Howard, and to Peggy. To Bucky. 

There had been one small moment, before Maria’s weak cries had pierced the stillness of the dark bunker, when Bucky had wrenched Howard’s head back. For just a heartbeat, they’d stared at each other and then Bucky had put his fist through Howard’s face.

Steve doesn’t know that they’d ever had occasion to meet, but Howard would have seen Bucky’s face so recently, in the course of commissioning the same gaudy Howling Commandos memorial that Steve has just visited. 

He would have looked hard at that glass relief of Bucky’s brooding face, perhaps wondering what Steve found so compelling about the erstwhile Sergeant, even after all these years. He would have studied Bucky’s haunted expression and maybe even felt a pang of remorse at having slandered the young soldier’s memory just to get back at Steve.

In his final moments, Howard must have thought that he was seeing a ghost.

* * *

During the walk to their grim business, Peggy tries to bury the grief that threatens to choke her. She knows that she’ll have to watch every grisly frame not just once but multiple times, and she can’t afford weakness clouding her judgment. For once, she’s absurdly grateful for the hard interior she’d painstakingly cultivated over the long, hard years at SHIELD. 

Thompson has set the film up to play on a large-screen TV, so that they won’t miss a single detail. 

“This is what we got from Camera 3,” Thompson tells them, pointing to a schematic of the road and surrounding locale that’s been hung on a wall and marked with tiny, frantic pen-strokes. “The camera itself looked like it had already been destroyed, but SHIELD forensics checked it just in case and the film itself was intact.”

“Why destroy the camera but leave the film?” Daniel wonders, rolling closer to examine the schematic. 

Thompson shrugs. “He was in a hurry? Shooting out the camera was the best he could do at the time?”

“He didn’t look like he was in a hurry,” Peggy cuts in, and her voice sounds flat and cold even to her. 

Immediately, they both turn to look at her, and deep down she feels a comforting flash of annoyance. Their respectful deference is starting to rankle, and her growing irritation is a welcome respite from pain. She doesn’t need them to agree with her, now—she needs them to argue, to produce theories and to shoot down her own; to be as sharp and brusque as though Howard were a visiting dignitary and not their longtime friend and colleague.

She won’t be able to stand it otherwise.

“He looked like he had all the time in the world, as you’ll notice. Daniel, keep an eye on the left arm—we think it may be some sort of robotic.”

Daniel looks at her warily. “Are you—”

“Play it,” she orders abruptly, clenching her hand around the back of the chair. 

Out of the corner of her eye she sees Daniel and Thompson exchange a look, no doubt full of pity. She ignores them in favor of fixing her gaze to the screen. She won’t look away.

She can’t.

Thompson starts the film. Peggy bites her tongue until she draws blood, letting the pain ground her. She watches with studied detachment as Howard spills out of the front seat, unaware that his cargo is being inspected.

“Did he shoot out the tires?”

“The crew is still working over the car, but we didn’t find any bullet holes.”

Peggy tries discern some kind of background from the Soldier’s lazy, leonine walk, but the only conclusion she draws is that he must be a man so accustomed or inured to killing that he feels no compunction about his task.

She observes as he smashes his fist into Howard’s face, deducing from the dripping mess he leaves behind that the arm might well indeed be composed of actual metal. Some sort of advanced Soviet robotics, maybe.

She forces herself not to look away as the Soldier reaches down to grip Maria’s throat, staring blankly out across the top of the car as she struggles like a landed fish in his grasp. Peggy notes that does not once look down at her.

After the Soldier languidly shoots out the camera, Peggy turns to Thompson. 

“You said that there was audio.”

Thompson swallows. “It’s not—it’s nothing that would be useful in this case.”

“I’ll be the judge of that. Run it again.”

To his credit, Thompson doesn’t argue with her, even when he’s proven horribly correct. Maria’s tinny screams certainly don’t shed light on any new angles.

“2 and 4 were dark, so we think he must have cut back through the woods, maybe,” Thompson is telling her, when Daniel leans forward, frowning.

“Spin that back,” he orders. “Seven, no – ten frames.”

“This is a _VCR_ ,” Thompson informs him, but he obligingly rewinds the tape. 

Howard spills out of the front seat, and tries to drag himself forward, apparently unconscious of the Winter Soldier’s unhurried approach. The Winter Soldier leans down and grasps Howard by the hair.

“ _There_.”

Thompson pauses the film. Even sharpened to the best of SHIELD’s abilities, the image is still grainy. 

“What are we looking at?”

Daniel points distractedly. “I noticed it the first time around, too. He draws back and then he waits. It’s actually a good few seconds.”

Peggy squints at the frame. She’d noticed it herself, the first time around—the way they’d seemed to stare at each other, the Soldier almost immobile.

“I don’t see why it’s relevant,” Thompson admits. 

“Well, it’s out of character. What’s he waiting for? Peggy’s right—he takes his time—but he also never stops moving at any other point that we see. There’s no delay when he gets to Maria. Watch from the beginning. Okay—he checks whatever’s in the trunk—do we have people on that? Right—and then he walks over to Howard. Grabs him and—”

He’s right, Peggy realizes. In context, it’s actually a somewhat glaring anomaly. Every movement the Winter Soldier makes is both unhurried and efficient, except for when he draws back his metal arm to strike Howard. Then, the Soldier inexplicably freezes with his fist in the air for what must be more than ten seconds while they look at each other before he’s moving again, each action blending seamlessly into the next.

“What the hell,” Thompson mutters. “Yeah, okay. Making sure he’s got the right guy?”

“No,” Peggy says. She’s inches from the frame now. “I think he—Howard—is saying something to him. That’s why it looks like he’s hesitating.”

“Audio?” Daniel asks immediately.

Thompson shakes his head. “I’ll send it back to try and isolate it, but I think this is the best we’re gonna get—the cameras don’t pick up much anyway, and there’s a lot of ambient night-noise. Whatever Howard said to him was likely much too quiet to hear.”

“Can we get a good enough look at his face to try with a lip-reader?”

“Not likely at that range. Besides,” Thompson hesitates, “I don’t—I’m not sure it would be relevant. He was probably just asking—asking for help.”

Peggy takes the controller from Thompson, and replays the scene. Now that she’s looking for it, she sees that Howard’s mouth is indeed moving. It might not be relevant—might only be a paroxysm of pain, but if there’s the slightest chance it’s something important, they’ll need to know.

These are Howard’s last words, after all.

“The Soldier certainly didn’t hesitate to kill Maria, and she was likely talking, as well,” Peggy says shortly. “If anything, he may have been caught off guard by whatever it was Howard said, so we’ll need to know about it, too. If it’s just—something else, at least we’ll know. We pull on every thread until we unravel this.” 

They run through the tape a few more times before Thompson heads back upstairs. Before he leaves, he hands her a small manila folder containing copies of all known and suspected photographs or stills of the Winter Soldier.

An hour, she promises herself, and then she’ll head back to the trenches with the rest of the team. 

Daniel hesitates at the door before he follows Thompson. “Peggy—are you sure you don’t need any help in here?”

Daniel knows perfectly well that she doesn’t need any help—really, she isn’t likely to make any headway glaring holes into blurry photographs—but she smiles as she shakes her head, to show him that she understands. 

“I’ll be waiting when you’re ready.”

When he’s gone, she spreads the pictures out in front of her, still unable to shake that disquieting feeling of recognition. There’s precious little to go on, here—the pictures are mostly from the best angles off the enhanced tape, plus the photo from France that she’d studied with Howard and a hopelessly blurry silhouette that could really be anyone.

She’s almost given up when Thompson reappears, another paper in his hand.

“Here,” Thompson says. “Forensics composite sketch.”

She studies the proffered page. The drawing shows a square, sharply handsome face framed with thick dark hair. Her gaze lingers on the eyes, penetrating even in hesitant rendering, and the generous mouth. 

She knows this face. Somehow.

“We’ve got the make and model of the bike, too, and we’re cross-referencing anyone matching the Soldier’s description from where it was likely sold.”

“Anything on audio?”

Thompson shakes his head. “Nothing. And the forensic speech reader says it would be impossible to make out with any accuracy even if the footage was clearer. The best she can do is that the last word might start with a P, B, or M.” 

“Well, that certainly narrows it down.”

“Yeah.” Thompson laughs humorlessly. “Where’s Sousa at?”

“Upstairs with analytics I expect. I’ll be there shortly.”

Thompson nods, and then hesitates. “Peggy, Joe was saying that maybe—do you think it’s at all possible that Howard knew him? Or recognized him?”

She’s not sure of anything anymore. “I hope not.”

Thompson squeezes her shoulder before he goes, but she’s already scrutinizing the composite. 

She knows better than anyone how unreliable witness testimony can be. Human memory and visual perception are hopelessly malleable. Over seventy-five percent of false convictions are caused by inaccurate eyewitness testimony.

_Of course, it’s an absurd notion, isn’t it, that a mysterious Russian operative has been active for over fifty years._

Victims often swear that they’ve identified their attackers, only to be later proven wrong by incontrovertible DNA evidence. When the visual evidence is uncertain, bias and familiarity fill in the blanks based on prior experiences. It’s psychologically proven. Rationally, she understands that she does not recognize this man, despite the overwhelming sense of déjà vu she feels when she looks at him.

But she’s not remembering the photograph she’d looked at with Howard.

Instead, she can’t stop picturing Steve, for some reason. Steve scratching in his sketchbook, the one he’d always been so careful to keep close.

Why?

_I’d never heard of the investigation in Vietnam._

She remembers finding it stuffed in his dresser drawer, decades ago, on a warm day in April when she’d taken it upon herself to do the laundry, for once.

_He’s a ghost story._

She’d known it was private, but he was her husband. She’d so badly wanted access to that part of himself he’d always kept locked away from her. He’d always betrayed his feelings through his art. 

Dancing monkeys and icons crumbling into dust. 

She’d felt so desperately lonely, in those years. She’d known his silence had been for the greater good, but that hadn’t lessened her pain.

The first pages of the book had been filled with half-abandoned sketches, but she’d recognized the subject immediately.

_I used to sketch Bucky over and over, since I didn’t have anyone else to practice on._

She’d been disturbed to find that Steve had drawn his dead friend as though he were a revenant torn from Stoker’s pages—eyes ringed with black, hair long and ragged about his face. A gruesome phantom’s visage.

A ghost.

She’d thought, at the time, that it had been Steve’s grisly way of trying to cope with his own guilt.

Now she feels the blood drain from her face. A thousand tiny moments crash through her mind, faster and faster, culminating in Steve’s raw, devastated face. 

_Did you know?_

It can’t be. It’s impossible.

The picture slips from her limp grasp and the room spins faster and faster, white spots appearing at the corners of her eyes before abruptly, mercifully, everything fades to black.

* * *

Before he’d left Washington, Steve had walked a slow loop around the National Mall, eventually landing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

It had been raining, there, no heavier than a mist, and he’d stared out at the white spire, reflected back at twice its size on the turbulent Reflecting Pool. It was where he’d first met Sam, while out running the thirty miles that used to be his daily minimum. Steve’s still not sure exactly how or why that vestige of long-buried playfulness had suddenly surfaced, but he wonders, now, if it hadn’t been the coincidence he’d thought that two days later, Bucky had reappeared in his life. 

It’s much colder here, on Coney Island. Steve sits on a bench, alone, and stares out over the flat white boardwalk. It had stopped snowing sometime when he was on the train, and now the night sky is unusually clear, making the air around him feel even more bitter. 

Had he been a fool, to think he could have simply forgotten them all? To think that if he’d just put everything that had happened out of his mind, his life would have been easy and content? He’d been prepared to lie—had known that he would have to—but in 1947 it had all seemed so far away. Something that belonged to another, harsher, life, one that had already seemed a distant nightmare to him.

Bucky, he’d thought, wouldn’t truly surface until 1991, but only he would know it—he’d believed that any evidence of the Winter Soldier would have disappear back into the shadows right along with him. 

Perhaps he should have paid attention to how often Bucky had surfaced in his life through those years, in one way or another. A dissonant leitmotif, he’d once thought; jarring, flat notes that quickly faded away. Coincidence. A fluke.

Steve wants to believe in God, still, but he doesn’t know that he can quite square it with what he knows and what he’s seen. Despite his waning faith, he still thinks that perhaps there are larger forces at work, somewhere—older forces, maybe, not so conscious. Some sort of universal pull that guides the hand of fate.

Whether by unconscious choice, coincidence, or kismet, his own fate has been inextricably entwined with Bucky’s since the day Bucky had grasped Steve’s hand on the street after running off his bullies. They’ve never really been able to leave each other behind—Steve had followed Bucky to the war, and then Bucky had followed Steve to the future, and then—

_I’m with you to the end of the line, pal._

It had been a blessing, and then a curse, half-reminding him of the dark fairytales that Sarah had gentled for him in his childhood—he’d abandoned Bucky, after all, and so Bucky has unconsciously revenged himself on Steve. Perhaps Bucky is the dark half of his soul, or maybe he is Bucky’s. Maybe they’re simply destined to forever orbit each other, like twin stars unable to escape some strange gravitational pull. 

He isn’t sure his marriage will survive this latest betrayal. If Peggy ever discovers the identity of the Winter Soldier, she’ll never believe that he hasn’t known all along about Bucky. He’s not sure that there’s anything he will be able to say to put this right. She’s always disliked Bucky, for some reason that Steve’s never understood—she’d been uncharacteristically arch whenever Steve had brought him up, acting almost as though he were a rival. Her initial dislike had obviously been magnified through the years and Steve had thought that perhaps she’d hated Bucky for remaining faultless in Steve’s memory while she herself believed she’d failed to live up to Steve’s expectations. 

Maybe if Steve had been honest with her all along, her opinion would have softened over time, instead.

He’s not sure how long he sits on the bench, but it’s some long-dormant instinct that surfaces in his mind and finally rouses him from his daze.

He’s seen no other passerby and he’s heard no footfalls across the snow, but the sudden sensation of being watched pricks the hair on the back of his neck. He scans the boardwalk in front of him. Seeing no one, he twists on the bench and startles as he realizes how close his chance companion has gotten without him realizing it.

The man lounging against the streetlight pole is dressed much too thinly for the weather, in a light jacket and baseball cap, but he seems manifestly undisturbed by the frigid December air. He appears to be studying the white ground at his feet, but despite the casual set of his posture—hands in pockets, feet crossed—Steve instinctively knows that every muscle in the man’s body is held taut, as deceptively alert as an alley-cat.

As though Steve has addressed him, the man lifts his head, pinning Steve with familiar, pale eyes as cold and remote as the winter stars overhead.

“Hello, Steve.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :D Thank you all so much for reading! I appreciate your comments!! 
> 
> No Historical Footnotes! We've already been to the '90s, after all ;)


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Exposition. Enjoy!

1991 – ( _t_ )6

For a long moment, time seems to stand still. 

“…Bucky?”

Steve feels at once frozen and electrified. He clambers up from the bench to face Bucky squarely, nearly twitching as dueling impulses fight for control of his limbs. He doesn’t know where to put his hands.

Bucky neither moves nor invites approach. His hands remain in his pockets. His expression is unreadable.

Hope and confusion and terror and joy war within Steve’s chest. He feels as stunned as Peggy must have, felt back in 1946—except that she would have thought him a miracle, or a ghost. Steve, at least, knows the likely _how_ of Bucky’s appearance—the _why_ is clearly a much more concerning matter.

Steve is fairly certain that this Bucky isn’t the Winter Soldier who ( _had just killed Howard_ ) must be active now, but this also doesn’t look like the Bucky he’d left behind in 2023. This Bucky’s hair is shorter, raggedly hacked to just under his ears, and his face is hollow with hunger and marred by an angry red line slashing almost from temple to chin. The flesh of the wound has clearly knitted already, which gives Steve pause; like Steve’s, Bucky's skin does not scar, and can't imagine what could have put that there.

Still, it’s _him_ ; Steve has never— _could_ never—forget that face, no matter how many times he’d tried. 

Even before Dr. Erskine had found him, Steve had been a fighter by nature, forced to scrap for his existence in a harsh world that brooked neither weakness nor pity. During the War, that hard-earned survival instinct had quickly sharpened to a razor’s edge which had taken decades of inaction to finally—perhaps even forcibly—dull.

When Steve had arrived in 1946, seeing Peggy again had felt distinctly unreal, as though he were in a dream. A halcyon haze had seemed to settle over them as he’d taken her into his arms, so much smaller and more delicate than he’d remembered. She’d seemed impossibly soft and fragile to him, and he’d buried his face in her chestnut hair and all at once had felt dazed and limp and warm, as though he’d finally come in from the cold.

It’s so much different, this time.

Steve has spent the last forty-five years a soft-shoed civilian, sitting patiently on a cushioned sideline and watching the endless fight from behind a screen. The monotonous cycle of white-collar work and comfortable domestic living have lulled him into numb docility; he hasn’t gotten into so much as a fistfight since 1946. 

Now the world sharpens into focus around him. Seeing Bucky again isn’t like slipping into a soft dream—it feels, instead, like stepping into a hurricane. 

Without moving, Bucky radiates a tangible, savage vitality, the coiled danger implicit in his whipcord body almost palpable. His face, so familiar, rouses a half-forgotten, dangerous thrill; the flat, tigerish gleam of his blue eyes conjures the primordial instinct of cornered prey. Dying embers roar to hot life. Unconsciously, Steve’s hands flex as adrenaline floods his veins, unbidden. Bucky’s eyes track the movement, his lips twitching in something that might be a humorless smile.

It’s painfully clear that Bucky has found no peace in the Future, whenever that might be. 

_It’s going to be okay, Buck._

“What are you— _how_ —?”

“I’m from your world,” Bucky tells him, and then frowns a little. “Your timeline, I mean. I suppose this is your world, now.” 

His voice is mild, if a little hoarse. 

“What are you doing here?”

Immediately, Steve winces internally. Shock has harshened his tone and he sees Bucky’s eyes narrow slightly in response.

“Maybe I just missed you.”

They might as well be back in that apartment in Bucharest again, sizing each other up.

Steve tries to smile. “I missed you too, Buck. You have to know that. But I don’t think that’s why you’re here.”

They both know that Bucky would have had to have gone back decades earlier if he’d wanted to see that little guy from Brooklyn he’d once followed into the jaws of death.

The feeling of _wrongness_ that has plagued Steve since Peggy had told him about the footage of the Winter Soldier has risen to an almost unbearable level. He’d turned the matter over and over in his mind over the last twenty-four hours but couldn’t escape the conclusion that something must have gone terribly wrong; that there was simply no way that, in his timeline, SHIELD could have known about the Winter Soldier all along. He knows, with sudden, awful clarity that Bucky’s appearance now cannot be a coincidence. There is no other reason that Bucky should be here.

Bucky can’t have simply dropped in for a visit. Even discounting Bucky’s war-torn appearance, Steve’s absence must have been a matter of seconds, maybe minutes…unless something that hasn’t happened yet foils his plan of returning to the future to pass his shield to Sam. 

Even then—why come now? Nobody knows better than Bucky the significance of this date. 

Had Bucky returned to ensure that Howard’s death would have happened in just the same way? 

What must he think of Steve, when he’d realized that Steve had made no attempt to stop it at all? 

“You’re right,” Bucky admits. He doesn’t elaborate in favor of running his eyes over Steve in something like fascination.

_Did it hurt? Is it permanent?_

Steve feels the tips of his ears go red. He can’t quite make out the expression on Bucky’s face, although he senses no derision—wonderment, maybe, or perhaps even sadness. Steve feels a hot flash of embarrassment, followed by a familiar, prickly defensiveness that he hasn’t felt since 1943.

Steve’s become accustomed to being considered unnaturally young-looking compared to his peers—especially now that he’s finally clean-shaven again—but these days that puts him at a well-preserved mid-sixties. Bucky could now easily pass as his son. Steve’s blond hair is thinner and peppered with grey, and there are new lines around his mouth and at the corners of his eyes. The serum keeps his musculature somewhat intact, but he knows that lately, his old uniform would be too baggy about the shoulders and too tight about the waist. 

He tugs self-consciously on his jacket, drawing Bucky’s eyes. There are age spots on his hands, chapped red with the cold. 

“We should go inside someplace,” Bucky says, still staring at Steve’s hands. “I didn’t think about how cold it would be.”

 _For you_ , he doesn’t add, but he doesn’t need to.

Steve fights down the familiar swell of embarrassment and defiance. For a fleeting moment, he’s a foot smaller and ninety-five pounds again.

“I’m fine,” he says curtly, and Bucky blinks. 

“It’s just—it’s obvious that something’s wrong. It’s not that I’m not happy to see you,” Steve adds hastily, but that’s not quite true, either.

Steve is no stranger to shame. At first, he’d been ashamed of his own physical limitations, and then later, he’d felt the sharp sting of failure, whether deserved or not. 

Still, he’s never before felt so rawly stripped bare, although the feeling isn’t unexpected; there’s a reason he’s always been reluctant to imagine himself facing Bucky again.

“Where—when—exactly did you come from?” he asks, a little desperately, in some futile effort to distract them both.

Bucky seems to shake himself from his reverie. “2029,” he says. He licks his lips. “It—they sent me to find you. We need your help.”

“‘We?’”

“The Avengers.” 

Of course. Who else could have sent Bucky back here? Steve tries not to think of what must have happened in the six years since he’d left. Bucky’s appearance and demeanor are indications enough.

“Bucky, I’m—well, I’ve kind of been out of the game awhile.” Even to himself, Steve’s tone sounds awkward and defensive. He’s implicitly admitted that he didn’t try to right any wrongs during his _retirement_ , and he certainly doesn’t need to point out to Bucky how useless he’d be now in any kind of fight.

Bucky just looks at him. For just a moment, his impenetrable veneer shows a crack.

“Did you—did you ever look for me?” 

Steve swallows and looks away. He should have expected this. 

“Buck. You know I couldn’t.”

“But you knew where I’d be. You’d read the file. You knew exactly where.”

Steve forces himself to meet Bucky’s plaintive gaze, but finds he can’t hold it for long. He doesn’t point out that the file had been sparse and clinical—that except for the night of November 16, 1991, Steve would have had only vague ideas of where Bucky was at any given time. To get to Siberia, he would have had to upend the course of the twentieth century.

“Bucky, I—everything you did, no matter how horrible—it got us here. Without you, who—who knows where we’d be right now.” 

Bucky is silent for a long time. When he finally speaks, his voice is flat.

“In our timeline, Peggy Carter married a man named Daniel Sousa, who’d fought in the 8th Armored Division in World War II. Apparently, we rescued his unit outside of Bastogne. She kept her name.”

He pauses, and looks at Steve narrowly. Steve looks away. 

“You don’t think changing _that_ might change anything?”

“Bucky, I—”

Bucky waves an impatient hand, cutting him off. “It doesn’t matter now. None of that matters now. I just wanted to know—”

He shakes his head, once, as if to clear it. “Well. You changed things enough without trying, Steve.”

Steve grimaces. He was right, then—SHIELD shouldn’t have found that footage. God knows what kind of consequences this will have down the line.

“The tape,” he says, resigned. When Bucky frowns, Steve adds, “The footage, I mean. From last night. When Peggy told me they’d found it—that’s when I knew something had gone wrong.”

“Oh,” Bucky answers. He looks mildly surprised. “Well, no. Originally, that played out the way it was supposed to. Petty, maybe, but I—

“What do you mean, _originally_?”

“This isn’t the timeline you returned to, Steve,” Bucky says, a slight frown between his eyes. “The one that you made, for you and Peggy. It was, I guess, until I came, but you remember—every time someone goes back into the past, a new timeline is created. We’ve sort of—branched off, I guess.”

Steve tries to cast his mind back—forward?—across the decades, to how Bruce had clumsily tried to explain time travel. _Alternate realities_ , he’d said, or maybe _alternate timelines_. Steve knows that’s where he’s been this whole time, but if Bucky’s here _now_ —

“So you being here,” Steve says slowly, “You talking to me—” 

Unbidden, panic sets in. “Bucky, what happens if you being here makes it even worse?”

Bucky away to look out over the bridge, eyes distant. His voice is quiet. “It’s already happened, Steve. _This_ has already happened, to you. Strange saw it. Just by being here, you've changed far too much in this timeline to stop Thanos. Tony Stark will never become Iron Man because he won't be in Afghanistan to get captured. He will die in 2011 from an overdose presumed to be accidental but actually arranged by a man named Obadiah Stane.”

He looks at Steve again. "New York is decimated by the Chitauri army without him. To stop the threat, the United States military fires a nuclear warhead into the city, killing millions. Steve Rogers makes it out alive, but Natasha Romanov doesn’t. In 2014, Steve is killed failing to stop Project Insight.” 

Steve’s knees threaten to buckle as his world upends. He puts a hand on the bench to steady himself, fighting the bile that rises at the back of his throat. All along he’s been grimly white-knuckling it through preventable catastrophes and needless death, sure that his silence—his reticence—has ultimately been for the greater good. 

“How?” Steve croaks finally. “I didn’t—I had no contact with Tony. I was careful, I—I didn’t try to change _anything_.”

“But you had contact with Howard, right? ‘A butterfly flaps its wings.’ Anything could have altered it, I guess.”

Steve exhales, trying to steady his nerves. He can’t go backward now, and Bucky is here. Bucky’s here and now Steve knows what’s coming too and that means that this isn’t unsalvageable. Not yet.

“Okay,” Steve says, running a hand through his hair. He tries to recall once-familiar determination to his limbs. “Okay. So you’re here to—can we fix it? Stop Stane?”

At this point, they might actually have to tell Tony what’s going on.

Bucky looks at him in silence for a long moment. “No,” he answers finally. “There’s no stopping it. Even if I wanted to.”

Steve feels the blood drain from his face. Even if what Bucky’s saying is true, and he can bring himself to believe it—why would Bucky come to him now, when he’s past all hope but still has decades to fear what’s coming—to live out the rest of his days grieving for what will pass? 

“What do you mean? If we know—”

“There are consequences,” Bucky tells him heavily, “For breaking natural law. Strange knew. You—all of you—went back in time and you tried to cheat the universe, and now everything’s—well, _fucked_ doesn’t really cover it.”

Bucky flexes his left hand, which grates alarmingly. Steve isn’t even sure that he’s aware he’s doing it. 

“And we need your help to fix it. Believe me when I say that I wouldn’t be here if we had any other choice.” 

“But—how? I’m not exactly at fighting weight.”

Bucky pauses, and Steve gets the sense that he’s choosing his words very carefully. “Let’s just say we need someone – worthy.” 

Shame threatens to snuff the guttering fire of resolution. If he’s accurately following Bucky’s irritatingly broad hint, he’s not sure that he’ll be able to help there, either. He’s fairly sure that he wouldn’t be capable of lifting Mjolnir now; increasingly, he wonders if he hasn’t been able to since the moment he’d truly made his choice and revealed himself to Peggy in 1946. Besides, why would they need him when they have—

“Bucky,” he says, growing dread creeping up his spine, “Did—something happen to Thor?”

Bucky’s flat expression does not change. “Yes. He’s dead.”

“What—what _happened_?”

When Steve had left, everything had been fine. More than fine, it had been finally _safe_. The formless, unspoken threat constantly hanging over their heads like a dreadful miasma had finally materialized in the Mad Titan, and they had wiped it from existence. Twice. When he'd stepped onto that platform, it was with the assurance that an army of Avengers stood ready to stand between the world and any new menace. 

Thor had shaken off the hopeless despair that had gripped him during those long five years. He’d seemed vitally alive again, as formidable as he’d been and eager to charge off to new adventures. Sam will no doubt have stepped comfortably into a leadership role, especially now that he’s officially taken over the mantle of Captain America. Wanda’s rage and grief had allowed her to tap into a wellspring of power that had brought even Thanos to his knees, and from a purely tactical standpoint, the combined efforts of Shuri and Banner should have filled the technological void Tony had left behind. There were others, too, that Steve hadn’t really known—Spiderman, already twice as strong and fast as he’d ever been; Strange, from what little he’d gleaned, an actual, bona fide wizard.

All this, plus new allies from distant galaxies.

The world hadn’t needed _Steve Rogers_ anymore. He couldn’t have left if he’d ever thought otherwise. 

“Bucky,” he repeats, and he hears a vestige of the old tone of command creep into his voice. “I need you to tell me exactly what’s going on. No hints, or—just the truth.”

“Alright,” Bucky says, and Steve sees an answering flash of familiar defiance in his eyes. “You know, I told you that even in this timeline, SHIELD wasn’t supposed to find that footage of me on that mission. It’s probably because I was the one who killed the Winter Soldier.”

Steve recoils. “You _what_?”

Bucky taps his forehead, seemingly approximating the bullet. “Intercepted him before the drop point. He wasn’t expecting it, of course. They won’t find the body, but I assume that the stateside HYDRA handler who was supposed to be taking care of the footage was too busy panicking about the mission failure.”

“Bucky—you— _why_?”

“Because it doesn’t matter,” Bucky answers savagely. The circles under his eyes are so dark that Steve is forcibly reminded of the Winter Soldier’s greasepaint. “And he deserved to be put out of his misery. This world and every other world out there is going to be wiped out no matter what happens here, sooner than you think. These people that you’re so concerned about? They’re all going to die in agony. That’s the real endgame.”

“Bucky.”

Steve’s feet travel of their own accord and suddenly he’s gripping Bucky by the shoulders, and even though every nerve is alight with adrenaline some distant part of Steve is registering that Bucky’s _really here_. 

“You have to tell me everything,” he says, and he doesn’t recognize the voice that belonged to someone else, someone straight-backed and proud-shouldered. “You said you needed my help, so there must be something that you think can fix this.” 

Steve can feel brutal tension gather beneath his fingers before Bucky pulls away, looking suddenly exhausted. 

“We can’t know for sure,” he admits after a moment, absently flexing his left hand again. The harsh, grinding noise sounds startlingly loud in the blanketed stillness of the night. 

“We have a few theories.” He grimaces. “I’m probably the last person left that should trying to explain it to you, though. There was a lot about quantum physics, and—well, anyway.”

“ _Try_.”

“One of them—apparently when Thanos first used the Stones, there was this—energy surge.”

_When Thanos snapped his fingers, Earth became ground zero for a power surge of ridiculously cosmic proportions. No one's ever seen anything like it._

“I remember that,” Steve says slowly. “It’s how we found Thanos the first time.”

“Oh,” Bucky says. “Well, Strange thought it might have—I don’t know. Torn a hole in the dimension, or something. Tony’s Snap, I mean. You took all those Stones from different worlds, and they aren’t supposed to be used like that. He said the balance of the universe is fragile, and that if something throws it off—like a high-enough power surge—that balance will start to collapse. Peter said it was a pretty well-known theory in quantum physics. ‘Vacuum decay’.”

He’s silent for a moment. “Carol thought it was simpler than that, though. She thought it was the effect of the time travel itself. I told you that Strange said there were consequences for messing with time and space. When you—all of you—went back into the past, you kept creating alternate realities, and time travel is invented there too, more often than not. It created a sort of—domino effect, I guess, replicating itself. All those realities led either to the Snap again or to worse. World-ending consequences. She thought the universe might have just buckled under the strain.”

_This is the fight of our lives, and we’re going to win. Whatever it takes._

“The only thing we do know for sure is that there are consequences messing with the natural order. Whatever it was you did—now the realities are bleeding into each other and the multiverse is trying to correct itself by tearing reality back apart again, and we realized what was happening too late. Every time we tried to stop it we only created more." Bucky smiles grimly. "Like an actual Hydra.”

“But I put the Stones back,” Steve argues. It had taken him what felt like weeks to do it right, but he’d managed it. “I closed the loop.”

Bucky shakes his head impatiently. “You can’t, not perfectly. _Anything_ different creates a new timeline. Besides, those other timelines you took the Stones from didn’t just stop existing. There’s a timeline where Loki steals the Tesseract back, after you guys fucked something up—Thor dies pretty soon after in that one. And then the one where Thanos came from, when he followed you guys to the 2023?” 

Steve nods faintly.

“It’s like—planets start eating themselves, all over the Universe. And those are just the ones we know about.” 

"So then why are you _here_?" Steve asks bitterly. “If we can’t stop it? Aren't you just creating another timeline?"

“Can’t really make anything worse at this point. The only things that can permanently alter—this— _without_ creating more instability are the Infinity Stones. We think that if we can gather all of the Stones—the right way this time, from the same world—we can reverse it. Seal the universe off.”

“But you can’t,” Steve argues. Something about Bucky’s plan nags at him—doesn’t quite fit with what he's saying—but he’s still reeling from the weight of so many revelations that he can’t begin to parse out what it might be. “Thanos destroyed the Stones.”

“Thanos _atomized_ the Stones,” Bucky corrects. “He only thought he’d destroyed them. That doesn’t mean they’re gone. They can’t be. If he’d destroyed the Stones, our universe would have been destroyed, too.” 

He’s quiet for a moment. “Apparently, the Stones have changed forms before. Thor told us that Thanos had to have solidified the Reality Stone to use it, so we figured maybe we could do the same for the other Stones, if we could find them.”

“And you did this all in what, five years? I thought it took Thanos decades.”

Bucky looks grim. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. There are things out there that know more about the Stones. With the universe collapsing, you’d be surprised at who—what—would be willing to—help. It took us years, and we weren’t sure we were right, but…anyway, it worked. When it—when they reformed, we just—had to find them again.” 

Bucky looks away. Steve’s guessing that whatever they did was a lot more difficult than Bucky’s somewhat blasé explanation.

“But if you change that, then…” Steve trails off. If Bucky’s right, and they can permanently alter reality, the ripple effects might spread to those alternate timelines he’d spoken of.

Including _this_ timeline. Including this Peggy.

“Will it affect this world?”

Bucky looks away. “I don’t know.” His voice is flat.

Steve clenches his jaw. “Then how is what you’re doing now any different than what we did before? No matter how it was made, this world _is_ real, right now, and you might be putting everyone in it in jeopardy. I need you to do better than ‘ _I don’t know_.’”

Without warning, Bucky suddenly shoves him back with his right hand, the motion savagely quick. The blow is relatively light but Steve still stumbles back, almost falling against the bench.

He’s up and automatically setting his feet before he realizes it, squaring the chest that once bore a star. Bucky eyes Steve’s balled fists with grim satisfaction. 

“You don’t know what it’s like,” Bucky hisses, his eyes blazing. “What we’ve lost. Everyone is _dead_ , they’re _gone_ , Steve, and none of them got to live out their fifty perfect years.” 

This second, harder blow hits home. 

They stare at each other for a moment and the air seems to crackle between them, like a coming storm. For a moment Steve thinks that Bucky’s going to hit him for a third time, but then the tension abruptly leaves Bucky’s body. He gives Steve a wide berth to sag down onto the bench, folding forward and looking suddenly small. After an awkward moment, Steve joins him.

“You’ve got no idea,” Bucky says finally, his voice dull. “The Return caused chaos on a scale you couldn’t dream of. Billions, suddenly back, except that everything was so different. Power struggles, famine, war—and that was just on Earth. That energy surge? It was like a—a beacon. Everything was converging on Earth—aliens, things that I don’t even—and at first we were just trying to hold it all back. I don’t know if they thought we still had the Stones, or what, but—they wiped out whole cities before we knew what was happening. Countries, even. Wakanda was taken out early, before Carol could get here. Beijing and New Asgard went quick after that. At one point we were infiltrated by an alien race that can look like anyone they want, so nobody knew who to trust. People killed their family members, people killed—it was—”

He closes his eyes. “And that was even before we knew the universe was starting to collapse under the strain of the multiverse you all created. Every time you time travel, you’re making a new universe, technically, and it creates a faster and faster feedback loop as that universe uses it, too. And it was like—I don’t know—reality couldn’t hold the strain of all those worlds coming into existence, and everything started—going haywire. Bleeding into each-other. Toward the end, in some places, things just—” Bucky shudders. 

Steve thinks of watching Bucky crumble away to dust before his eyes. He tries not to think of what might have happened to Clint, or to Wanda. To Sam. 

“Peter and Shuri took days to get the calculations right,” Bucky says. “And we still weren’t sure it was going to work. A lot of the timelines have already been wiped out.”

They’re both quiet for a moment. 

“Who else is left?” Steve asks softly.

Bucky looks at him, and then away. “Not many. Carol, Strange. Wanda.”

“God, Bucky.” 

So many gone, while he’d done nothing. 

“Strange thinks that Earth—you know, since it’s where the Snap went down—that the surge kind of radiated outward from it. Like we’re the eye of a hurricane. Lucky for us, I guess, that New York’ll be the last to go. When I left, it was getting pretty bad. We’re sort of racing the clock now.”

Steve can only guess at what pretty bad means.

“But I—we—can stop it? If we get the Stones?”

Bucky shrugs tiredly. “Maybe,” he says. “I don’t know. It’s our last shot, anyway.” 

He looks at Steve, his mouth set in an unhappy line. “For what it’s worth, I didn’t want to take you away from—this. I tried to—I wanted it to be any other way, you know? You deserve to rest. You shouldn’t have to be dragged back in.”

Steve looks down at his hands. Artist’s hands—skin smooth and knuckles unbloodied. 

_Don’t you ever miss it? Being Captain America?_

“I’ve been resting for almost fifty years, Buck,” he counters, just as quietly. “I think my time on the bench is up.”

Bucky crooks one side of his mouth up. It looks like a wince. “Still.” 

Steve feels numb. He should say goodbye to Peggy. If everything goes to plan—whatever that is—there’s no reason for her to ever know he’s been gone. There’s also no knowing whether he’ll make it back from this one, or if he’ll even be able to.

She doesn’t deserve for him to simply disappear like this.

He looks at Bucky. “I really did miss you, you know?”

Even when he’d tried so hard not to. 

Bucky refuses to meet his eyes. “I know.” 

Steve lets his gaze linger on Bucky, taking in all the details he hadn’t realized he’d forgotten. He wonders if this is what Captain America had looked like to all those faceless civilians—impossibly powerful and larger than life. 

Still not looking at him, Bucky asks, almost hesitantly, “Is it—what you wanted?”

Jesus. How can he answer that?

He looks away from Bucky to watch the snow drifting over the boardwalk. He thinks about the way that Peggy had tucked her head under his chin as they’d swayed together in the living room, young and barefooted and carefree. He thinks about carrying her over the threshold of their house after he’d finally gotten the keys, both of them laughing so hard he’d almost dropped her. He thinks about watching cities burn above his TV tray. He thinks about the cast-off cruelties of his ignorant contemporaries, and about staring at ironic posters of his own grinning face.

He thinks about ugly realities and pretenses stripped bare, and about the look on Peggy’s face last night, as though she were seeing him clearly for the first time. Had he ever looked at her like that? 

“Some of it,” Steve answers finally. 

He leaves the rest of it unspoken, but Bucky nods anyway, as though he understands. Maybe he does.

If Bucky had shown up out of the blue in 1967, smiling and at peace, what would this meeting have been like?

“I’m sorry,” Steve adds, and his voice breaks. For just a moment, he feels like he's Steve Rogers again, and he thinks that his heart might crack in two. 

Bucky finally looks up. His face softens. 

“You couldn’t have known, Steve,” he says, not unkindly. “None of us did.”

“Still. I should have been there. With you.”

_Don’t do anything stupid until I get back._

Bucky draws a deep breath and seems to steel himself. “You couldn’t have known,” he says again, his voice a little firmer now. “But we can still fix it. If you come with me.”

Steve's not Captain America anymore—he doesn’t know if he can ever be again. Still, for the first time in forty-five years, he doesn’t hesitate.

“Where are we going?” 

Even as he asks the question, Steve knows the answer. 

Bucky’s smile is achingly sad.

“The Future.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for reading! I appreciate your comments!!! :D Sorry about the wait! Crazy illnesses, to be perfectly honest. I'm having my own personal Civil War in my small intestine.
> 
> A quick Word About Timelines: 
> 
> The movie (and the only semi-sensical time travel theory) dictates that every time the Avengers went back into the past, they've created a new timeline. I suppose that technically, there's a timeline where Clint's kid can't find his baseball glove. The Ancient One doesn’t say that the timeline will RE-MERGE with the prime timeline when a stone is returned, only that the timeline won’t go dark for missing a stone (although the associated visual is admittedly confusing).
> 
> I was mildly annoyed because in Dr. Strange they were all bally-hooing about all the consequences to messing with time and violating natural law, etc. They made so much noise about it that when I first saw Infinity War a drunken friend of mine momentarily lost his head and immediately thought that was why people were disappearing after the Snap (I'm not sure how he missed the...central premise of the film, but still). So it was weird to me that in Endgame, absolutely nobody brings this up. Also, I thought it was odd that in Endgame they specifically mention Earth being “ground zero” for this huge surge of cosmic energy, and nothing comes of that, either. I suppose it was just a convenient way to find Thanos, but it stuck out to me. 
> 
> Historical Footnotes:
> 
> Not sure if this counts, but I encourage you all to look up Vacuum Decay! It's a real theory of how the universe might end and pretty close to what I've written.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End of Part 1. It was always going to end this way.

_“One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for.”_

_– Aldous Huxley, Brave New World_

2029 – ( _t_ )1

Steve expects that they’ll blink into 2029—or maybe even 2023—and he braces himself for the bright harshness of the world he barely remembers anymore.

Instead, Steve opens his eyes onto a desolate, windy plain, devoid of life and warmth. He understands immediately that they are not on Earth. The planet’s only source of light, a weak red sun nearly eclipsed by a bloated black moon, illuminates the landscape’s most prominent feature—a barren mountain jutting high into the roiling purple clouds. 

The weight of awful finality threatens to crush him.

“Bucky,” Steve asks quietly. “Where are we?”

He knows the answer already. He’s been here once before. 

Bucky must know that, too.

Bucky looks at him, and then away. “Let’s go.” He lowers his head into the wind and sets off toward the mountain, glancing back only once; to make sure that Steve is following him.

Bucky moves surefootedly up the mountain, and Steve struggles behind. He moves as if in a daze, helpless to turn and run, the way he wants to.

 _It was supposed to be me_ , Clint had said. _It can’t be undone._

The air grows colder as they climb higher, and Steve starts to see flakes of snow drifting around him. The bitter air cuts through his jacket and stings his face. Just once, he slips on an icy patch of path. Bucky pauses, and waits for Steve to regain his footing, but does not once turn around. Unbidden, Steve thinks of Orpheus and Eurydice.

 _Let’s just say we need someone worthy_ , Bucky had said. 

As they ascend, the treacherous terrain solidifies into steps carved deep into the rock. They ease Steve’s passage, but the knot in his stomach tightens.

Somewhere deep down, Steve can’t help but expect that Bucky will turn around at any moment, unable to go through with this. In the end, inexorably, they arrive at the summit. Hulking rock spires channel them toward the two monstrous stones that frame the looming cliff. When Steve had first seen it, it had put him in mind of the ruins of some Neolithic temple, half-reduced to rubble. As before, the cold stone inscrutability invokes the impression of a pagan cairn—or worse, a place of sacrifice. 

From here, the dim red light of the sun looks like a bloody gash in the sky.

Bucky stops.

Just before him, Steve sees the hooded, wraithlike figure, floating lifelessly above the ground. The shade of an old enemy, from another life.

“Welcome, James, son of George,” the wraith sighs, in a voice as thin and brittle as old bones. “Steven, son of Sarah.”

“You know us?” Steve asks numbly, but he already knows the answer to that, too. He’s asked it once before. The familiar call-and-response invokes the dreamlike resonance of ritual. 

“It is my curse to know all who journey here.”

“And where _is_ ‘here’, Bucky?”

He wants to hear Bucky say it. 

“Vormir,” Bucky says finally, still facing the cliff. “We’re on Vormir.”

A flurry of snow briefly haloes his dark head.

“Bucky,” Steve pleads. He knows the answer—of course he knows—but he wants to be wrong, so badly. “Why are we here?”

Even the glove couldn’t bring Natasha back. _I tried so hard, but—_

Finally, Bucky turns to look at him. Steve sees agony in every familiar line of Bucky’s face. He used to sketch that face until he knew it better than his own, never imagining that this beautiful boy—his protector, his only friend—could—

“There was no other way,” Bucky says. His voice is faint. “I told you that we needed all the Stones, and that we found them. All except one.”

Steve closes his eyes. “The Soul Stone.”

Bucky nods, cutting his eyes away. His face is grim.

“And how exactly do we get that?”

_You pulled me from the river. Why?_

It’s the wraith that finally answers, the sharp accent cutting through the awful silence to tell them what they both already know. “To gain the Stone, you must lose that which you love.”

The bitter wind snatches away the thin words. 

“So,” Steve asks quietly, spreading his arms. “What happens now, Buck?”

_Let’s just say we need someone worthy._

Bucky raises his eyes to meet Steve’s, chin tilting almost imperceptibly in faltering bravado. Steve recognizes the gesture. 

“I’ll make it quick.” Bucky’s voice cracks.

‘”You’re really gonna do this.”

“I wouldn’t if there was any other way.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” Steve snaps. Anger and despair war within his chest. “Why me? Is this—are you trying to get back at me?”

Bucky looks away, and something ugly and helpless curls in Steve’s gut. He knows that no matter what happens here, he won’t be returning to Peggy, and that he’ll never get to make amends or to say goodbye. She’ll grow old and sick without him, never knowing where he’s gone. Even after everything—no matter what would have happened between them—she doesn’t deserve that. And Bucky can’t understand that, how could he? Bucky was a child when he fell from that train. 

They both were.

He grabs Bucky’s arm, and forces Bucky to look at him. 

“How do you even know if this is going to _work_?” 

_You pulled me from the river. Why?_

Bucky flinches hard, but holds his ground. “I’d give _anything_ not to have to do this, but it’s—we have no other choice. There _is_ no other choice.”

_I don’t know if I’m worth all this, Steve._

“The entire universe, and you had to take me? You couldn’t have chosen _anyone_ else?”

Bucky’s raw, agonized expression is enough to dispel the notion. Even as he speaks, Steve knows that his protests are unfair and maybe even cruel, just as he knows, with grim certainty, that nothing he says will stop Bucky from leaving this mountain with a Stone in his hand. 

Still, some part of him wants to go back and forget about everything that’s coming, and he hates himself just a little more for it. Everything feels at once dreamlike and more real than anything that’s happened over the last forty-five years. Two days ago he was cooking French toast and dreading the task of trying to figure out what to do with himself in retirement. 

What would he have tried to savor, if he’d known how little time he’d really had?

“ _Please_.” 

He’s not sure what he’s asking for.

“We _can’t_ ,” Bucky snarls finally, shaking off Steve’s trembling hand. “Don’t you think we’ve tried? We even—we brought others, from other realities, but—”

He takes a shuddering breath. “You can’t cheat the Soul Stone,” he says dully. “The real price must be paid. We can’t use the—the copies created by the multiverse. We already tried, but the Stone—it knows, somehow. It doesn’t work. There are now infinite _Steve Rogers_ living across infinite realities and I could kill them all and it wouldn’t mean a thing, because they aren’t _you_. It needed to be someone from the original timeline, but—” 

Bucky laughs jaggedly. “Well, it wouldn’t work between any of us that are left. And we needed everyone to stay alive as long as they could, to finish it. Once we got the Time Stone, we knew we could potentially retrieve someone from the original timeline, but doing that could affect _everything_ , irreversibly. We couldn’t risk it.”

“But I was outside of that timeline,” Steve says slowly, the realization heavy in his chest. “I was in the alternate timeline that I made. You could take me without changing anything from _your_ universe.”

Bucky nods, his mouth an unhappy slash. In the dim light, his hollow eyes look black.

“It’s why we left it—you—for last,” he whispers. “If we couldn’t find the other Stones…”

He trails off, but Steve follows his train of thought well enough. They would have left him in his fabricated timeline, maybe hoping that he would die of old age before it started to crumble around him. 

They would have thought it a kindness.

“Strange is going back before the Snap to change it, isn’t he?” Steve asks. He suddenly feels oddly calm, as a bone-deep resignation washes over him. “That’s what the plan was all along.”

Bucky nods again, almost imperceptibly. “The Time Stone is the only thing that can change time permanently—without creating a new reality. He’ll exist independently of the timeline. He can stop Thanos before any of this can happen.”

Bucky must have lied to him earlier, then, when Steve had asked if his timeline would be affected. If Strange can prevent the Avengers from retrieving the Stones, Steve’s timeline will never have existed in the first place. 

Neither of them will. All of this will have been erased as though it never was.

Ever since he’d arrived in the Future, Steve had quietly ached for what he felt he’d been denied. Standing on that platform, his nerves vibrating with anticipation, he’d believed, deep down, that he was finally about to collect on what he was due, as though he was somehow owed a reward. As though he were the only one who had lost something.

As though they all hadn’t been cheated of their happiness, one way or another.

 _The real price must be paid_ , Bucky had said.

Maybe _this_ is his cost finally come due, to have gotten what he thought he’d wanted—the second chance that he’d realized too late could never truly be. 

Was it worth it?

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Bucky drops his eyes. He makes no effort to hide the misery etched onto his face. “I thought—I thought you wouldn’t come with me, if you knew. But it’s the only way. And I couldn’t have forced you.”

Steve would have liked to have said goodbye. He thinks that maybe he should feel angry that Bucky’s deception had prevented it, but instead he just feels strangely wistful.

“We left it was as late as we could,” Bucky continues hoarsely. “Tried to time it so that you could stay as long as possible but still be able to—climb. I don’t think I could have made myself carry you up. And even then—” His voice breaks off, and he turns away, letting his hair hide his face. Steve sees his throat work as he tries to compose himself.

“Honestly, I thought it wouldn’t work,” Bucky admits, running a hand over his face. “I really thought it wouldn’t. I picked the date and I told myself that I wanted to make sure that the—the me in this world was dead, but really I came because I wanted to prove to myself that you wouldn’t have saved me. Even though you’d already changed everything else, you wouldn’t try to save me. And I was right.”

Steve opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He can’t deny it. He hadn’t even considered the notion until it was too late.

“You know, the real reason I killed—well, me? In your timeline? I told myself that it was mercy. I thought, ‘if Steve won’t save me, I’ll have to save myself’, right? Do what I should have done in the first place. I—he—doesn’t deserve to go through what I had to go through, all this _shit_ —”

He sweeps his arm across the barren landscape in a savage, futile motion. 

“But even then, I was just fucking lying to myself. You know, Strange had to look at your timeline, right, to find you. I told you that Steve Rogers is killed trying to stop Project Insight. And that’s true.”

Steve already knows what Bucky is going to say. It’s written all over his face. 

“It’s me—the Winter Soldier—that kills him in your world. I don’t know the details, but I guess enough changes that I get the upper hand on you. And he didn’t deserve that—to have to live with that.”

If this plan works, the Bucky Steve had so ruthlessly created from nothing will never have to live with anything—he’ll never have existed in the first place. Killing the Winter Soldier was a pointless gesture on Bucky’s part, but Steve understands it.

“So yeah, I thought I would see you and I would just—not have to go through with it. The whole fucking fate of the universe is riding on this, but deep down I think that maybe I just wanted to prove to myself how much I hate you.”

Steve starts, Bucky’s words unexpectedly cutting deep. He shouldn’t be surprised—Bucky did take him up here to kill him, after all—but it still hurts. Bucky’s quiet voice fills with desperate loathing. 

“You know, after Insight failed, and I first started to remember things—I wanted to kill myself. I almost tried it half a dozen times. And I just—even when I didn’t really understand why, I would remember you. Just stupid things, little things, and I—I just wouldn’t be able to do it. I thought maybe things would be better when I finally remembered everything, but they were so much worse.”

 _I remember_ all _of them_.

“And then when I was finally—almost—I don’t know. A _person_ again, you just…left. You didn’t even ask me if—yeah. I was alone and there was nothing left for me but these—these _memories_. Having to live forever with this awful shit in my head. And sometimes I would think, ‘if I could make myself forget again’—” 

Bucky tries to smile. His face collapses in bitter lines.

“And then I would hate you for making me think that. I hated you for leaving me, and I hated you for not killing me on the helicarrier, and I hated you for saving me from that table. I should have died so long ago, but you kept making me _live_ , again and again until you didn’t want me anymore and look what it’s done to me.”

Steve looks at Bucky’s face, at the desolation in his hollow eyes. At the curl of his dark hair, the unhappy bow of his mouth, the smooth skin that bears no hint of the painful years or of the irreparable wounds he suffers. Steve thinks of the laughing boy who had stood between Steve and his schoolyard bullies. He thinks of the proud young soldier who hadn’t hesitated to pick up Steve’s shield and place himself in the line of fire.

He watches Bucky’s weak smile falter. 

“It’s like a fucking curse, pal,” Bucky says softly, “Loving you. I’ve paid for it over and over, but I can’t stop. I loved you when you were a skinny kid with a crooked spine, and I loved you when I saw you tonight on that boardwalk.” 

He raises a hand, and gently touches trembling fingers to the deep lines at Steve’s eyes.

“Steve, I—,” he tries, and his voice breaks, choking off whatever he was going to say.

They stay frozen like that, for a few seconds or for an eternity, staring at each other. Bucky looks so young and lost. 

Steve burns at Bucky’s touch, the faintest brush against his face. He could turn his cheek into Bucky’s palm. He could say something to ease his pain. 

There are so many things that he should say.

He looks at Bucky and he finally remembers what it felt like to be bigger than himself, even if only on the inside. His heart aches, and he wishes with all his might that he could take this burden from Bucky. Steve can’t begin to make up for what he’s done, but he can give Bucky some small measure of peace now. 

Bucky waits. 

Steve’s throat works, his thoughts racing. This is his only chance to get it right.

“I’ll give you as long as you need,” Bucky murmurs finally, and he walks past Steve towards the edge of the cliff, staring out into the void.

Despite everything, Steve will go out saving the world after all. He’s relieved to find that he’s not afraid—that some steel of resolve, however thin, has somehow endured. Instead, he feels only a deep, almost gentle sadness, and a little regret. Despite the profound weariness that has transcended his unnaturally long life, he’s still sorry to go, even now.

His life— _lives_ —should be flashing before his eyes, but for some reason he’s remembering a tiny, insignificant moment during the War. The Howlies had been walking for what felt like days, and when he and Bucky found themselves out in front, all alone, he’d taken the opportunity to quietly grouse about how hungry he felt all the _time_ , now— _cripes, Buck, I’d even be happy eating_ your _cooking these days_.

It had been the perfect opening for Bucky to tease him about his hulking new frame, but instead Bucky, a few steps ahead, had wordlessly turned without breaking stride and tossed an apple to Steve, all in one fluid motion. At Steve’s undoubtedly stunned look, he’d flashed him a bright, mischievous grin, the kind he’d once worn so easily.

Steve never did figure out where Bucky had been hiding that apple, or where he’d gotten it from in the first place.

Bucky has been the only constant in a long, strange life that by rights should have ended centuries ago in a ramshackle tenement, done in by scarlet fever or pneumonia. No matter where one has gone—to war, to the future, to the past—the other has never failed to follow. 

Steve finds himself wishing he could just see that smile, one more time. It isn’t fair to either of them but it’s fitting, somehow, that Bucky will be the one to do it. 

_I’m with you to the end of the line, pal._

He takes a breath and steels himself. This is his last chance. He has to get this right.

“Bucky—“ Steve starts, wheeling around to face him, and he’s still not quite sure what he’s going to say, but it doesn’t matter. Bucky is true to his word and there’s almost no pain when he slides his knife unerringly between Steve’s ribs and into his heart. The last thing Steve feels is Bucky catching him gently as Steve folds forward into his arms.

Steve is dead before Bucky carries him to the cliff, cradled against his chest, and finally lets him go. 

1927 - ( _t_ )1

“Hey, kid. Y’okay?”

Steve blinks, tears still obscuring his vision. A tall boy of about his own age—clearly the one who’d run off Mack and his friends—is leaning over him, holding out a hand. 

Steve’s pride stings, but he takes it. The boy’s strong, warm hand feels like it could snap Steve’s in two, but instinctively, Steve knows that this boy won’t hurt him.

“That was stupid,” the boy tells him, not unkindly. He watches Steve wipe the blood from under his nose. “Taking on all those guys at once.”

“ _You_ did,” Steve retorts petulantly, waiting for the boy to point out the obvious differences in their size and stature, but the boy just throws back his head and laughs. 

“Yeah, but you’d already roughed them up for me by the time I got there,” is all he says, firmly brushing dirt off of Steve’s coat. “Oh, almost forgot!”

Like magic, he produces the two bits Steve had been carrying. “You headed somewhere with those?”

Steve nods, humiliated. He hates needing anyone’s help, even when it’s so cheerfully given. “Yeah,” he answers quietly, “Thank you.”

The boy seems to sense his embarrassment and glosses right over Steve’s reluctant gratitude. “Market, I bet. Listen, d’you mind if I walk with you? Only my ma kicked me outta the house for a few hours since she says I ain’t doin’ her headache any favors, and I get bored real easy.”

He grins so charmingly that Steve can’t help but smile reluctantly back. He knows exactly what the boy is doing, and he hates being anyone’s charity case, but the boy’s smile looks kind and genuine and really, Steve’s in no position to turn him down.

Nobody’s ever wanted to be friends before.

He nods, shyly.

“Great!” the boy says, enthusiastically swinging an arm onto Steve’s shoulder and practically sending him back down to the ground. “Hope you ain’t a Yankees fan. What’s your name, by the way?” 

“Steve.”

“My name’s James, but nobody calls me that. You can call me Bucky.”

1943 - ( _t_ )1

“Where are we going?”

“The Future.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m sorry!!! Don’t hate me. But in all fairness, that’s how I planned it from the start. I did give you some warning way back in Chapter 1, when Strange notes that Bucky’s heart has to be in this or the plan will fail. Comments are appreciated!
> 
> I’ve also got Part 2 all planned out—all I will say is that this will all be dealt with, one way or another, and the Steve/Bucky relationship will move into the forefront.
> 
> Thank you everyone who read and commented! I had SO much fun researching and writing this, even if it is a 65K-word tantrum about Endgame. I know some people thought Steve was acting a bit OOC, but what can I say – the studio-mandated return to the past was wildly OOC to begin with, and I had to work with what I had. 
> 
> I’ve said this in the comments, but Steve returning to the past just…doesn’t work. Having finally acclimated to the twenty-first century and explicitly moved on from the past, he… abandons everyone he loves and creates his very own parallel universe to retire in. All so he can be with a woman he’d had a crush on for a few months, way back when he was an entirely different person with completely different life experiences. It undoes everything about his character development, and it really cheapens a lot of the bittersweet scenes in his trilogy.
> 
> After the Steve/Bucky relationship being a main focus of Cap’s trilogy, it was really sidelined in IW/EG, probably because a) huge ensemble; b) they had to hastily pivot to showcase the Sam/Steve relationship before passing the torch; and c) it would have highlighted everything wrong with Steve’s leaving for the past. Just like the “moving on” subplot, the whole thing renders Steve’s trilogy sort of pointless on re-watch. 
> 
> Finally, if you didn’t know, the Monkey’s Paw is a shorthand reference for when your wishes are granted, but at an enormous price for interfering with fate. I know a traditional fix-it might show Steve realizing the error of his ways and suddenly realizing how much Bucky means to him, or something, but in the movie, he didn’t do that. He showed up as self-satisfied Old Steve who apparently hadn’t quite learned his lesson. So, you know. Thank you for reading!!!!!<3

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know your thoughts, and be kind - quarantine is the only reason I've gone and posted in the first place. It'll be a long, slow burn.


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